


As the Sparrow Flies

by Azzandra



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brigmore Manor, Child abuse/neglect, Death, Gen, Magic, now with epilogue!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-01-28 15:13:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12609452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: In the year after her mother's assassination, Emily learns a great deal about Dunwall, about trust, and about power. Mostly, she learns never to rely on adults.(Dishonored 1 AU: Emily gets the Mark instead of Corvo)





	1. Cat's Cradle

Curled up on a bare floor, Emily Kaldwin sulked.

Madame Prudence's nails had been like claws, sinking into Emily's arm, and Emily could swear she still felt the ghost imprints. If she pulled up her sleeve, she knew there'd be bruises in the shapes of fingers on her upper arm.

"Let me go!" Emily had yelled, defiance bubbling just slightly higher than fear.

"Just because you're going to be Empress one day doesn't mean I won't tan your hide now," the Madame hissed into Emily's ear in return.

Emily hadn't known what that meant at the time. In the abstract, she knew about tanning from her lessons on economics--something they did to animal hides--but it hadn't occurred to her that Madame Prudence meant beating her until she saw the pinched look on Custis Pendleton's face.

"Damage your own goods as much as you wish," Custis muttered, unhappily, "but the girl is not yours to whip like some common trollop."

Madame Prudence's lips tightened together, but she gave Emily a final shake and released her.

"Of course, Lord Pendleton," the old woman said coolly.

Custis placed a hand on Emily's shoulder, perhaps intending it as an avuncular gesture. It just felt possessive to Emily instead, and she tried to shake him off, unsuccessfully.

"I will take the girl back to her room," Custis said, and the Madame acknowledged it only with a displeased grimace.

He pushed Emily along, back up the stairs to her room, and they were up one flight from the Madame's office when he shoved Emily's shoulder, turning her halfway towards him, and rounded on her with naked fury on his face. Emily took an involuntary backwards, and pressed against the wall, suddenly feeling very small.

"And what," Custis hissed, "did you think you were going to do once you were outside, you stupid girl?" He was ten times more venomous than Madame Prudence had been, a vein throbbing at his temple.

Emily crossed her arms across her chest, tried not to shrink back--she was going to be Empress, just like her mother--but she suspected she looked more like she was hugging herself, hunched down and afraid against the filthy wall. She swallowed down a knot of tears in her throat.

She'd been close, so close this time. If she hadn't crossed paths with one of the Golden Cat's customers at the VIP entrance, she could have slipped out, gone down to the river, stowed away on some boat. But she'd been caught and hauled back to Madame Prudence's office. And then Custis had shown up, drawn by the commotion.

"Well?" Custis Pendleton growled. "What were you going to do, hm? Get eaten by rats! Die in a ditch with blood pouring out of your eyes! You ungrateful sow, after we go through this effort to keep you safe and comfortable! You're not Empress yet, you--"

Custis' words bit off into a howl as Emily's foot shot out and kicked him square in the shin. His expression, already thunderous, shaded into something more dangerous. Emily paled, struck by the thought that she might have made a mistake. 

She didn't know what Custis would have done, because just as his hand twitched and started to rise, and before she could fully stop herself, she turned and started running up the stairs, taking two at a time. She didn't think about it--there'd been a wall at her back, and Custis blocking the way down, so up was the only way to go, even if it was a dead end.

She heard the heavy thud of footfalls following her, each one making her heartbeat thunder in her ears and panic shoot acidly through her veins. She tripped just as she reached the final steps to the last floor, and that was when Custis caught up with her, and she felt his hand sink into her hair, grabbing her. She keened, more out of fear of what Custis would do than pain, and she sounded like a wounded animal even to her own ears.

Emily felt her head jarred as Custis grabbed her by the hair and pulled up. She found her feet quickly, afraid he would pull out her hair if she didn't, and let herself be harshly maneuvered through the hallway. Then Emily was pushed back into the room of her imprisonment.

She stumbled as Custis released her hair, and fell to her knees, bent down double against the fear of what he was going to do.

"You stay here, or you die like your bitch mother," he said, and Emily flinched at the mention of her mother. "Your choice."

He slammed the door closed, and Emily heard him twist the key in the lock, once, twice, three times with dark relish.

She didn't rise. Her heart still drummed a wild beat in her chest, but her limbs were turning to jelly, and shaking. She slipped down to the floor completely instead, curled on her side. 

She bit down on her fist, face heating up in humiliation and anger, and only half-stifled the sob that wracked through her. She wouldn't give Custis Pendleton the satisfaction of hearing her cry, but the tears came all the same, and Emily spent them all in silence.

 

* * *

 

For the next few days, she was held on a shorter leash. They watched her closer as she was escorted to the bathroom. They were more meticulous about making sure her door was locked. And the Pendleton twins made a few more visits to her room, taunting and threatening, and telling her nobody would come to rescue her. 

If this was meant to put Emily off her plans to escape, then it had the opposite effect. She bore the Pendletons' taunts with all the icy demeanor she could muster, the way her mother would bear the back-handed insults of courtiers. She would be Empress one day, but she would never be the Pendletons' or the Lord Regent's puppet. Emily was adamant about not letting such a thing pass.

The only hitch in her planning was, well, the planning part. She was familiar enough with the Golden Cat's layout that she could probably find her way out, but she had blown two good opportunities to escape, and now she was watched closer than before. The back door was locked, the front entrance was guarded. There were open windows and balconies, but the balconies usually had guards, and the open windows were all on the higher levels. Until she could figure out how not to break her neck falling, Emily wasn't very optimistic about using them. She didn't even have enough sheets for a rope ladder; she'd checked.

So each day, she woke, she paced until she was tired, then she sat on the floor to draw, and she turned the situation in her head, over and over. And each evening she went to bed for fitful sleep, no solution forthcoming.

She still hoped, each day, that the door would open and Corvo would step through, to whisk her away. The Pendletons kept telling her he was dead, executed at Coldridge Prison, but the Pendletons were liars. One had told her Corvo was shot, and the other that his head had been chopped off. She believed neither story, and suspected that it was one more cruel thing the Pendletons were needling her with.

Corvo couldn't be dead. He couldn't. He couldn't.

But since he hadn't come for her yet, that meant he was in trouble. So, Emily decided grimly, it would be her job to save him instead. Somehow.

 

* * *

 

Emily wasn't sure what woke her, except for a sense of strangeness on the air. She sat up in bed, trying to figure out what was off in her small cell, but when she looked towards the door, her breath hitched in her chest.

The door was open.

She threw off her sheets in a hurry, didn't question why she was already dressed and her shoes on as she jumped out of bed, and she made for the door. She was out of the room when she realized what was off.

"Oh," she breathed out, shoulders slumping, "I'm dreaming."

These were not the dusty back hallways of the Golden Cat. Or, they were, but only partially: the walls and floor cut off in jagged pieces, to the day-bright nothingness beyond.

Emily felt strangely lucid for what she was sure was a dream, and it took a few more seconds before she hesitantly concluded that this must be the Void. She was used to dreams of foiled escapes, but she did not think she'd ever been in the Void before.

Despite her apprehension, this felt a bit like an adventure. The good kind, like in books. She looked around, and discovered that along one end of the broken off hallway, there was a rocky path, arching upwards in a soft slope. 

Had that been there before? Emily decided it didn't matter. The only other way to go was back into her room, and she was sick of its walls. She followed the path, curious to see where it took her. Broken pavement interspersed with stone stairs, and her heels clicked daintily against the ground, but the sound did not echo, even though it felt like it should.

The path ended on a plateau, a broken off chunk of paved street, with a willow tree emerging incongruously from it, roots shifting stones out of place. In the windless Void, not a single leaf shifted on the tree. It may well have been stone as well.

"Hello, Emily."

She flinched, whirling around to see the shape of a young man coalescing, blotting into view like an inkstain spreading across paper.

"Hello...?" she said, uncertain.

"Your life has taken a turn, has it not?" the man asked, his mouth slanting into a sardonic smile. 

 

* * *

 

Emily flinched awake the next morning, suddenly and acutely aware of herself. Her stomach sank in disappointment as she realized she had been dreaming, but she sat up and looked down at her hand and right there, like floating driftwood to a drowning sailor, was the Mark.

She let out a long, shaky breath, trembling even though she wasn't cold. She gestured towards the far end of the room, and felt something inside her extend towards that spot, hook in, waiting to pull her like the snap of an elastic.

But she relaxed her grip on the magic, letting it sputter out like a candle, and recalled the other gift she had received the night before.

Carefully, Emily raised her cupped hands, and the Heart appeared, heavy and hot like a living thing. 

She stared at the thing for a moment, fascinated and scared all at once. It looked like something a natural philosopher could have made, in one of those horror stories she wasn't supposed to read. It beat to its own pulse, the gears inside soundlessly turning, and when she squeezed it--

_'The plague swept through here. There are rooms they have yet to clean.'_

It was a voice, but not a voice. Emily didn't think she was hearing it with her ears. It sounded like the voice her thoughts were spoken in, for all its strangely dreamlike quality. It almost seemed to come from inside her own head, though she was sure she didn't imagine it.

Emily discarded this thought for now, oddly hesitant to answer this question, and focused instead on the beat of the Heart. When she turned the Heart towards the wall, it beat faster, manic or eager--Emily couldn't tell, though her own heart wanted to match the speed in response. There was a rune there, in the room just next to hers.

The Outsider had told her about the runes. He had said--and how strange to think about this detail now, but his eyes had been black from side to side, and she hadn't even thought it was out of the ordinary in her dream--but he said that the runes could give her more power. As she'd chased across the Void, searching for him, she had stumbled across two of them, and they had melted away in her hands as she picked them up, and made her veins thrum to a song she thought she could barely hear.

There were other runes as well, more far away, but Emily thought of the one in the next room over, for now. She let the Heart slip away from her hand, vanishing back into the Void, and looked at the wall thoughtfully.

Then, recalling that thrum of the rune, she gestured towards the wall. Something passed over her eyes, like a shadow, and the world drained of color, so suddenly that Emily was startled. Her eyes were drawn to the bright oranges which jumped out of the sepia tones, in the shapes of people and even some scurrying rats.

She inhaled sharply, excitement bubbling up again as she looked around, tracing the pathways of guards and courtesans, managing to distinguish motions and gestures. Her gaze swept over the strange juxtaposition of two of the glowing orange shapes, and she looked away, feeling embarrassed and uneasy, certain this was one of those things she wasn't meant to know about yet. She rubbed her eyes, her cheeks burning, and the dark vision went away, the world becoming opaque and multicolored again.

She would have to get the rune, even though Emily felt hesitant to steal. Belinda, the girl who lived in the room, was always kind to her, bringing Emily biscuits and ox milk, new crayons and paper when she ran out. But she was also, Emily realized, one of her jailors, however kind. If Emily ever tried to leave, Belinda would try to stop her just as surely as Madame Prudence. 

No, Emily was alone. There would be no one coming to save her, and nobody in the Golden Cat who would help. She would have to plot her escape on her own.

Then she heard the turn of the key, and Emily felt a stab of guilty panic, before she calmed herself that nobody could hear her thoughts.

But she tugged on the sleeve of her nightshirt, pulling it down so the material was gathered in her fist, and covered the Mark on the back of her hand. If anyone saw it, her advantage would be lost.

Belinda appeared in the doorway, her head poking in.

"Good morning, Emily," Belinda greeted with a soft smile. She looked tired; all the women in the Golden Cat always seemed tired to Emily.

"Good morning, Belinda," Emily said, and hopped out of bed.

It was the morning routine Emily had gotten used to. Belinda would walk her to the bathroom, so she could use the facilities and wash herself. Once or twice a week, they would even take Emily down to the steam baths, and some of the women would provide her with bath salts and sweet-scented soaps from their own reserves. Belinda would brush Emily's hair, even though there was not much to brush. It was their own way of doting on her, Emily thought. But at times, it only made her feel like an object of pity. They did not know who she really was, only that she was here because the Pendletons wanted to keep her here, and because Madame Prudence was paid a hefty pouch to put her up.

She followed Belinda--on the right side, keeping the left hand tucked in, paranoid the Mark might be visible through the white material of the nightshirt.

"Are you cold?" Belinda asked, with a tilt of her head.

"Only a bit," Emily said, shrugging and trying to look less conspicuous. "I'll just wash real quick and get dressed, and then I'll be fine. Maybe you can bring me warm ox milk for breakfast?"

"Of course," Belinda said, smiling though it didn't reach her eyes.

She spoke no more of it, and instead led Emily to the bathroom. It was the same path they took every morning and every evening, but Emily looked at it with new eyes now. There were ledges and windows and blind corners she could use now, and seeing through walls provided advantages all on its own.

The bathroom was empty. The courtesans mostly worked nights, and went to bed at the crack of dawn, and that left the Golden Cat quiet at this time of day. Emily went through her morning routine quietly and quickly, but peered through the walls, getting a better idea of how the building came together.

As they returned back to the top floor, Emily eyed the rune on Belinda's table. She didn't need the Heart or her dark vision to know it was there. This close, she could hear its strange song. As Belinda walked ahead to open the door to Emily's room, Emily took advantage of Belinda's turned back. In two flicks of her far reach, Emily snatched the rune and returned to her spot trailing behind Belinda, and if she was off by half a step, Belinda certainly didn't guess.

Emily let herself be ushered into her room without much protest.

 

* * *

 

Breakfast was brought to Emily's room on a tray, bread and sausages joined by two plump Tyvian pears. There was even a mug of hot ox milk, as she'd requested, and Emily smiled brightly at the woman who'd brought in the tray. Not Belinda this time. Belinda, as Emily's dark vision revealed at a cursory glance through the wall, was rifling through her room, upending everything in some panicked search. She'd noticed the rune missing.

The breakfast was also joined by her daily elixir, which the woman who brought breakfast dosed out for Emily, and watched hawkishly to make sure she drank it all. 

Once she was alone, Emily took out the Heart again. Without the rune nearby, it was quiescent. It still felt heavy in Emily's small hand, and warmly alive. She gave it the lightest squeeze and it spoke to her, the kind voice from afar resonating on the inside of her mind.

' _They ship them in from farming villages, bastard daughters and extra mouths that can't be fed. They thought they would be working in a factory. By the time they arrive it's much too late._ '

Emily didn't fully understand, but as the words sank in and she turned them over in her mind, she felt the prickle of anger. There was some injustice here, something awful and wrong happening, even if she couldn't fully grasp it. It felt like something she was meant to set right, and she swore to herself she would, as soon as she was Empress.

From the next room over, she could hear Belinda scratching at the walls, weeping for her lost rune.

 

* * *

 

Emily surveyed the room for what she hoped would be the final time, and felt not an ounce of regret at the thought of leaving it behind. Her eyes paused over the drawings she'd pinned to the wall, but only briefly. She'd stuck a couple of crayons in her pocket, but only out of a sense that she ought to be taking something with her. Her pockets were too small to fit much of anything.

She also wrapped the length of a white ribbon around her left hand, careful that not a bit of the Mark was showing. She tried tying it off, but with only one hand, she had only managed a clumsy loose knot, so she tucked in the ends and hoped it wouldn't unravel or be noticed.

She knocked on her own door, banging over and over until her fists were sore.

Someone came eventually. She heard the scrape of the key in the lock, and the click as it turned. When the door cracked open, it was not one of the courtesans, but a guard who opened. His eyes were bloodshot, and narrowed at Emily like she was a criminal--or at least little better than one.

"Wha'you want, girl?" he said, his breath reeking of cheap alcohol so strongly that it made Emily's nose wrinkle.

Emily hadn't been expecting a guard, but the man was drunk enough that she suspected this would work even better for her purposes. She straightened her back to her full height, remembering all the etiquette lessons where boring matrons made her totter around with a book balanced on her head because it taught her 'poise', and she raised her chin regally, the way she'd seen her mother do.

"I wish to see Madame Prudence," Emily said. "Please take me to her office."

The guard stared at her for a long moment, and Emily thought he'd refuse, but he apparently only needed some time to process the request, because he huffed.

"Follow me," he said, his face screwing up in what he probably thought was an intimidating glare, "an' no funny business. Got my good eye on you, girl."

"Of course, sir," Emily said, affecting her best expression of innocence. It was probably a bit much, and if the man had been more sober, he would have detected just how insincere the promise was, but as it were, he seemed satisfied. He adjusted his belt with a confident nod to himself, and turned towards the stairs.

Emily followed him, feeling light on her feet, sick with excitement. This was it. This was her chance. She would never have a better one.

One flight down was Madame Prudence's room, directly above her office. The guard turned on the stairs, not even glancing to see if Emily was following, and Emily knew she would have no better chance than this. There were the archway overlooking the Golden Cat's parlor, and just beyond them, the open window overlooking the Golden Cat's courtyard.

Emily waited until the guard began descending the stairs to the next floor, and with her heart beating out of her chest, turned away, towards the archway. Hand extended, and as quick as a thought, she was on the edge of the window, and then climbing out onto the vents.

She wondered how long it would take the guard to notice she was missing, if he would look back as he reached the bottom of the stairs, or if he would stupidly knock on Madame Prudence's door and stand there like an idiot, trying to explain to the mean old crone what he was doing there. He would probably turn back to look for her either way, climb all the way up, and then search the whole stairway for her. They'd check the VIP entrance, of course, knowing she'd made for it last time. 

But Emily didn't care. She followed the ledge of the building, on the outside, where they wouldn't even think to look for her yet, and the air, tinged with salt and the distant reek of death, had never smelled sweeter to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a while ago I came across a prompt on the kink meme about what would happen if Corvo died during DH1, and my first thought was 'Well, Emily would get the Mark then.' Which kicked off an interesting series of speculations for me. Now, I don't want to kill Corvo, but imagining Emily with the Mark was too interesting to pass up.
> 
> Anyway, you can find me on [tumblr](http://azzandra.tumblr.com/).


	2. Hide and Seek

It was in no way like a game, but Emily thought of it like hide and seek anyway. She was good at hide and seek. Even Corvo thought so, and he was better at sneaking than anyone Emily knew.

This wasn't like playing at Dunwell Tower, where she knew every stone, and had learned how to keep the stiff soles of her shoes from clicking against the ground. She walked the length of a metal vent slowly and carefully, stymied by how loudly the metal resonated, but unwilling to stop in case anyone should look up and spot her. 

The rooftops were not as loud, and more out of view, but she had to watch her footwork carefully because sometimes there would be a loose tile, and even if she did not slip on it and fall, there was still the frightening possibility that she would send a tile falling straight onto the head of a guardsman.

Rounding the corner of a building and out of direct view of the Golden Cat felt liberating, however. She found a balcony to drop onto, and retreated inside almost without thinking.

It was mostly bare, the apartment uninhabited. But there was a rune there, left on a small sidetable, next to a poster advertising the Golden Cat.

Emily picked it up almost without thinking, and it disappeared in her hands, leaving some of its power to burn in Emily's veins. It felt good, after the chill of the rooftops.

But as it disappeared, Emily was left with the anxious question of where she should go.

She was out of the Golden Cat now, and she knew she had to put distance between herself and the Pendletons, but where to? 

The river? No, she didn't have a boat. She couldn't waste the time going around looking for one, especially since by now they probably knew she was gone, and would soon extend their search.

She'd stick to the rooftops, she decided. They would look for her in every darkened corner, but they wouldn't think to look up. Why would they? Emily didn't have wings, as far as they knew. She had a satisfying mental image of the Pendletons frothing with anger as they were informed Emily had seemingly disappeared into thin air. Oh, if they only knew...

But no, Emily shook her head to concentrate on the issue at hand. She had to leave. She didn't know what her plan was yet, except getting as far away from the Golden Cat as she possibly could. She would find some place to hunker down, some abandoned apartment far from their reach, and she would think about it then.

She continued on to John Clavering Boulevard, and then scurried for the shadows when she realized she'd underestimated the City Watch presence there. She wedged herself in the blind spot between two roofs as she listened to the city-wide broadcast system blare out plague announcements. 

Emily licked her lips, recalling the elixir she was given everyday, and wondering if she should have tried to take some with her, somehow. But she couldn't think of any way she could have done so inconspicuously, and besides, she'd just had her dose that morning. She probably wouldn't get sick already. She'd just have to find some more soon.

She kept to vents and pipes over Clavering Boulevard, used her far reach to flit from high place to place, and having passed unnoticed over the heads of the City Watch, she found herself in the Distillery District. 

The smell of the plague was heavy here, like it had its own presence. Emily gagged, her stomach roiling, and she had to keep a hand to the wall to steady herself as she walked the length of a pipe. She clambered from the pipe to a low roof, and found herself on Bloodox Way, though she wouldn't learn its name until later.

She considered going back towards Clavering Boulevard, but other than the fact that its roofs were high enough above the plague to smell better, there wasn't much to recommend them. Emily needed a hide-out, and food, and elixir. She wouldn't find those things on the roofs.

So where would she?

Emily paused on the roof to consider her next move. Directly across the way was some sort of shop, but she had no money, and she was hesitant to go down. She didn't feel like she had enough energy for many more far reaches that day, and she didn't want to have to scurry back up in a hurry if the street was dangerous. 

She followed another set of pipes, arching around the building and along Bloodox Way, and in a brief moment of inspiration, she realized there was an open balcony right across the street. She knew many houses were abandoned due to the plague, and with the daylight fading, she would need somewhere to sleep overnight.

Extending her hand a final time, she quickly transposed herself onto the open balcony. The smell hit her like something physical, and when she finally took stock of her surroundings, and peered into the apartment, she discovered it was indeed uninhabited, at least in the sense that any occupants it had were not alive.

There was no mistaking the shapes piled up against one of the walls, though they were shrouded in white, but Emily stared uncomprehendingly for a long time anyway, her mind unable to form any tangible thought, like an audiograph player trying to work without a card.

Emily had never seen corpses before. She had seen her own mother, bleeding and dying, and she had seen the quick flashes of violence when previous assassination attempts had come too close, and she had been at state funerals, mostly as a squirming presence, behaving only for the gaze of her mother. She had even held the bleached bones of strange Pandyssian creatures, and the dry bones of a long-dead human subject at the Academy of Natural Philosophy once, and had been amazed by the carefully preserved specimens they had in jars.

But she had never--she had _never_ \--seen _corpses_ : the brutal truth of rot and disintegration, of something once human slowly turned to soft squelching unrecognizable thing. 

She turned on her heel, wanting to run, but she didn't manage to go far before bile rose in her throat and she puked. A sob tore through her at the same time, miserable and disgusted and afraid, and she emptied her stomach over the balcony ledge, making herself gag even after she had nothing left to regurgitate. There went her last meal, there went her last dose of elixir, splattered against the filthy street below.

Hand shaking, Emily reached out towards the nearest roof, and fled into the night.

 

* * *

 

Emily flinched awake at the sound of broken glass, and every ache in her body flared at once. 

She had wedged herself in some nook she'd found over the passage between Bloodox Way and Endoria Street, but it hadn't been her intention to fall asleep. She'd merely found a warm spot among the twisting pipes and vents, and wanted to ward herself against the chill of the night. She'd huddled with her back against a wall, pulling her knees to her chest, and at some point she had put her head down on her knees, just to rest her eyes. Now there was a pink tinge of dawn to the sky, as night had passed her by.

Emily stiffly got up. Her knees lanced with pain after spending the whole night bent, and she had a terrible crick at the back of her neck--she found herself unexpectedly sympathizing with all the adults she'd ever heard complaining about their stiff old bones. If this was how they felt every morning, no wonder they griped so much.

Her throat was also raw, her mouth too dry and her lips cracked. Her stomach clenched at remembering why, so she tried not to think about it. She would have to find some water, at the very least. Food. Elixir. Warmer clothes, considering how cold it got the night before, and how cold it was going to keep getting.

Emily tried not to despair, but it was suddenly sharply obvious to her just how much upkeep her own body took, and now those responsibilities were hers. It was one thing to be alone at the Golden Cat, where no matter how selfish the adults around her, it was still in their best interest to make sure she was cared after. It was quite another to be alone out in an indifferent world, overflowing with so much death that even her own might not be noticed.

There was another sound of glass breaking, and a sharp laugh, and Emily suddenly lost her train of thought. She crept towards the noise, towards Endoria Street, and caught glimpse of two children throwing bottles at a building and smothering laughter.

They looked like street urchins, by their patchy clothing and layers of grime, and certainly Emily was in no position to judge; stains were already ground deep in her white satins, where she'd brushed against filthy walls and pipes, where she'd touched it with her dirty hands or stood too long in the billowing smoke of a chimney. She could not pass as the misplaced child of some well-heeled family from Clavering Boulevard, but neither could she walk among the common people without someone noticing that the make of her clothes was, suspiciously, much too fine. 

But she was not so far removed from those parentless waifs who roamed the alleys of Dunwall, not anymore. And they certainly knew how to survive the streets, Emily thought.

She still hesitated, trying to think of what she'd say to them, but the Heart appeared in her hand, heavy and warm, and Emily angled it towards the children. She only had to give it the gentlest squeeze.

' _Drowning the first kitten was an accident_ ,' the Heart sighed. ' _Drowning the second one wasn't_.'

Apprehension skittered down Emily's back, her hesitation deepening. She was going to turn the Heart towards the second child, but she was distracted by the steady pulse of a rune. The Heart beat a mad tattoo, alight and excited to show the way.

It was in that house. The one the urchins were throwing bottles at.

Emily sat back on her haunches, considering the open balcony on the second floor. She was thirsty and hungry and tired, but the runesong perked her up; the anticipation of that surge of power through her veins, that would maybe let her forget her human frailties.

She considered her path across the short alley and to the balcony, and how she might pass without being noticed, but luckily the urchins grew tired of their pointless sadism against the house and wandered off. There was nobody else on Endoria Street, except for a shape slumped against the door of Bitterleaf Almshouse. Emily thought it was a drunkard. She hoped it was a drunkard.

In two quick snaps of her far reach, she was on the balcony, and walking into the house. She was dizzy for a moment, and braced herself against the doorframe. After spending the previous evening using her Void powers, it seemed like she hadn't quite recovered her energy. Lack of breakfast probably didn't help. 

She shook her head, trying to rein in her misery, and proceeded into the building. It smelled strangely, a bit like the smell of death and rats that permeated the city now, but also like wet mulch and garbage and dry leaves. 

She passed the rotting mattress and started climbing down the stairs, the Heart guiding her closer. She was nearly at the bottom floor when she heard it.

"Eat your soup, dearie! How are you going to get better if you don't eat your soup?"

Emily trailed to a halt on the final landing before the first floor. The voice had been of an old woman, and it only now occurred to Emily that someone lived there.

She hesitated for a long time, listening to the mutters and the strange wet noises of something being stirred, and she considered going back out. The rune was close, but the house was obviously occupied, and in retrospect, she should have used her dark vision to check beforehand. Emily looked at the Heart, beating wildly at the proximity of the rune, and tried to decide what to do.

The voice rose above a mutter then, chiding, "Are you going to skulk around all day, or are you going to greet Granny? Come out, dearie, don't be rude."

She sounded like one of the elderly ladies in her mother's court, the ones who pinched her cheeks and slipped her hard candy and constantly commented on how tall she was getting. What a strange thing to hear in this dismal house.

Emily stepped out and closer, and it was not a lady of the court that she came across, but a blind old woman in ragged clothing.

"Well, come closer, dear, let Granny have a look at you," she said, gesturing as regally as any aristocrat.

Emily's hand twitched on the Heart a final time before letting it disappear back into the ether. ' _Long ago Granny Rags danced at court_ ,' it told her. ' _Men begged to marry her._ '

Against the growing sense of cold alarm building up, Emily approached the old woman, and on an impulse, Emily curtsied, just the way a dozen etiquette tutors had drilled into her.

"Hello, I'm sorry," she said, her voice rough. She swallowed, her mouth much too dry. "I didn't think there was anyone here."

Granny Rags clasped her hands, delighted.

"What a precious little thing you are," Granny Rags declared. "Like a doll with real hair."

She approached Emily, her eyes blind but eerily focused, and she raised a hand to Emily's face, grasping her chin. It was a gentle gesture, but firm in a way that made Emily think pulling back would be a bad idea.

"You must be parched, dearie. Shall we have afternoon tea? I know how much little girls love tea cakes."

"It's morning, actually," Emily pointed out, bewildered. But she didn't say no. 

 

* * *

 

There was no tea, and certainly no tea cakes.

What Emily received was a cracked mug filled with a blue liquid. She thought she recognized it as Piero's Spiritual Remedy; she'd been given it a few times, when the usual elixir deliveries were late at the Golden Cat. It was considered something of a poor knock-off of Sokolov's elixir, and nobody was entirely sure if it worked as well.

But drinking it now was something of a revelation. It soothed Emily's thirst and made her aches fade, but it also made her feel like some spigot had been turned, and power poured from the Void straight into her body. Her Mark pulsed once, like a hungry creature now fed and satisfied, and Emily felt strengthened enough to cut across the length of Dunwall by rooftops alone.

"You've met him too, haven't you?" Granny Rags asked, passing an open tin of whale meat to Emily. "My handsome black-eyed boy."

Emily, sitting on top of an old dresser, accepted the tin and then momentarily paused at the prospect of eating with her filthy hands.

"The Outsider?" Emily asked, too distracted by the food under her nose to notice Granny's sharp expression. "Um, he seemed nice, I guess." She didn't know about handsome. He didn't look like much to her, other than the black eyes striking a strange picture. "He played hide and seek with me."

She finally stuck a piece of whale meat into her mouth. She'd had it before, but the whale meat at Dunwall Tower had always been perfectly chilled and cut into little cubes. This whale meat was room temperature, and as a strip of it pressed against the roof of Emily's mouth, it felt too much like live flesh. Luckily she was too hungry to care anymore.

Granny Rags let out a dramatic sigh.

"He is so cold, my handsome boy," the old woman said, "but that hardly matters. We will be married soon."

Emily actually had to pause from eating.

"Does he know that?" Emily asked, sounding exactly as dubious as she felt.

Granny Rags reached out and pinched Emily's earlobe, clearly in reprimand, and with unerring accuracy for a woman who was supposedly blind.

"Such a sharp tongue you have for your age, dearie!" Granny said, as disapproving as any aristocratic matron. "You didn't get that from your mother. But then, blood will tell. Oh, yes, blood will tell."

Emily felt a chill at the mention of her mother, some sense of alarm that this old woman might have guessed who she was, and that she was going to be stuffed in a sack and handed right back to the Pendletons (she wasn't sure why the detail about the sack was so vivid in her mind, but it certainly seemed likely in the moment).

But then, Granny Rags also believed she was engaged to the Outsider, and Emily was fairly confident that couldn't be true. She had seen plenty of wrinkled old men get married with young ladies, but she had never, to her memory, seen an old lady get married with someone so young.

Emily ate, and kept quiet. She'd become good at that sort of thing.

 

* * *

 

The Heart whispered warnings; the Outsider, when Emily approached his shrine, spoke his own warnings more clearly. Granny Rags was dangerous.

But then, Emily thought with a bitter twist to her mouth, the whole world was dangerous. Who and where could she go to, that she wouldn't be dangerous? Back to the Golden Cat, and her imprisonment? Back to Dunwall Tower, to be the Lord Regent's pawn? 

There were still loyalists, because Emily had overheard the Pendleton's bitter rants about them, but how would Emily know who they were, or whether she would be any less of a pawn in their hands?

She could only rely on Corvo, maybe, if she could reach him. But he was in the belly of Coldridge Prison, behind bars and walls of light, and large, bull-like men with swords and pistols. 

Emily knew, because she saw the guards patrolling the Distillery District sometimes, with their thick arms and hair-triggers tempers, and she had never known to fear the City Watch until she saw their version of keeping the peace. She was only three days out of the Golden Cat when she witnessed a beggar beaten to death because he'd coughed too near to a guardsman, and she'd huddled down on the roof, terrified that if she was spotted, she would suffer the same fate. She heard the beggar's pleading turn to pained moans, and then silence. She fled back to Granny's house after that.

Granny Rags' house was empty, and strange-smelling, and Granny did not seem to mind if Emily occupied a mattress on the upper floor and came to sleep there when she was tired. The old woman seemed, in turns, amused, indifferent, or distracted, and when she was not off in her own world, she seemed perfectly willing to play a good host to Emily.

She asked for things in return. Small favors, or small items. A bundle of kingsparrow feathers, or some hemlock essence. Emily would scour the roofs and abandoned buildings, and bring back what Granny requested and more. Granny would assess Emily's haul each time, and mutter to herself and to Emily, and even if she threw some things away--physically, violently hurling those things sometimes--at least she always seemed overall pleased with Emily's performance.

Once, early on, Emily went with Granny on one of her rag-picking expeditions, because she wanted to be useful in exchange for the shelter Granny provided.

Granny walked without fear through sewers and plague-infested alleys, and she poked through garbage like it was a trove of treasure. She picked out the bones with delighted gasps, like a shopper finding some particularly beautiful piece in a jeweler's window, and she pocketed small, seemingly inconsequential items with a cackling laugh, as if the world were giving her something for nothing.

Emily trailed after Granny with a satchel, and whenever Granny handed her something, she placed it in the satchel carefully. Raw whalebone, rusty cutlery, spools of thread, the blunt, square teeth of some animal, probably a cow if Emily had to guess. She didn't wish to guess.

They were in back alleys, places Emily didn't recognize or even wish to remember. The buildings had the stillness of abandoned homes, quiet and dark. The plague smell was heavy, but it was heavy all throughout Dunwall these days, so Emily did not even realize they were in some neighborhood still in the grips of the illness until she came across the first weeper.

Emily thought at first that the weeper was another rag-picker, like Granny. She was scrabbling desperately through the garbage, muttering to herself. But as Emily stepped a bit too loudly, the woman turned, and looked at her. Blood was streaming down her face, and flies were buzzing around her.

Emily stood transfixed. She'd never seen a weeper so close. She knew they were considered dangerous, but this woman was sick, and seemed more worthy of pity rather than fear.

Then the weeper lurched forward, a long moan resounding through the short alley, and took a series of stumbling steps, each one quicker and quicker, hands like claws outstretched towards Emily.

That was when Emily finally flinched and took a few skittering steps back, so startled she forgot she had magic that could save her.

Granny had been doddering further down the alley, assessing some copper pot while talking to her dead husband about the price of silver, but in a single blink of the eye, she appeared between Emily and the weeper, and for such an allegedly frail old woman, she backhanded the weeper hard enough to knock her to the ground.

"Manners, dearie," Granny said. "We mustn't frighten the guests, or what will the neighbors say?"

The weeper clambered to her feet again, lips pulled back in a rictus of fury, but before she could make for another attack, Granny's entire body turned to a frothing swarm of rats, and moved as a single creature to envelop the weeper. There were squeaks and wet crunching noises, and above them all the blood-curdling screams of the weeper.

Emily squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears, but the weeper's dying screams echoed long past her death. Emily trembled, unable to stop the shaking of her body no matter how much her instincts screamed at her to stand still lest she attract the attention of something terrible.

It could have been minutes or hours before Emily heard the shuffle of Granny's feet, coming ever closer, and she nearly stopped shaking when her body seized up in terror. She imagined dying in a swarm of rats, a thousand bites over every inch of her body. She would make a small meal, she was sure.

She felt Granny grip her forearms, as unyielding as iron shackles as she pulled Emily's hands down from her ears.

"Poor child, so sensitive," Granny said, with something like pity in her voice. Then, lightly, as if discussing a chipped cup, "Oh well, you were going to learn eventually. Shh, come to Granny."

She pulled Emily into an embrace then, and Emily went, stiffly, and let herself be held in Granny's bony grasp. Her mother had smelled of ink and subtle perfume, but Granny smelled like wet rats and garden mulch, and Emily started trembling again, too afraid to pull back.

 

* * *

 

Emily never went on another rag-picking trip with Granny ever again. She kept away from the alleys and sewers where Granny liked to stake her claim, and took to the rooftop even more than before. She found abandoned apartments, and she found that even people who still inhabited their homes did not lock their balcony doors. 

If Granny minded, she didn't show. As the weather turned, Emily found an old suit jacket had been left on her mattress. It was patched and faded, but may have been white and blue when some fashionable young woman acquired it from some tailor shop. It was a bit too big on Emily, hanging down to her mid-thigh, but she rolled up the sleeves and found a belt to tie around her middle, and then discovered that the belt was perfect for holding pouches. 

She found herself some better shoes, as well. A pair of rubber-soled boots, sized about right for her, but forgotten in an apartment with rotting food still set on the table. Her old shoes, once lacquered black but scuffed beyond recognition, had started feeling too tight. Her toes would hurt at the end of the day, when she took them off. 

She understood the tutting of the old servants at Dunwell Tower, who always seemed to remark at how quickly she outgrew everything. There were no kindly adults anymore to make sure her things were replaced before they felt too small. Now it was Emily's job to find herself new stockings with fewer rips, patched trousers to keep her knees from scraping during climbs, a cap to pull down on her ears when the chill winds picked up, gloves to cover the Mark on her hand.

Emily folded her old white dress and put it away, out of sight and out of mind, like all the things she tried not to think too much about but ended up brooding over anyway. It didn't matter. It was more gray and black now, tattered and stained.

It was almost six months since her mother died. Six months of Dunwall collapsing into itself, rotten and unwell. Rot in its gutters, and rot in its halls of power. All the way down, and up, and through.

And here was Emily, flitting across the rooftops above it all, unable to do much of anything.

 

* * *

 

She stopped over Bloodox Way, listening to the distant banter of the Bottle Street gang. The tinny echo of a city broadcast announcement warned the populace towards calm, then became drained out by the rattle of a train.

She'd grown bolder about exploring the Distillery District. Once, just once, she even returned to the apartment which had shaken her so terribly the first time she arrived to Bloodox Way. The shrouded dead were still slumped against the wall, and Emily studiously avoided looking at them as she graverobbed her way through the small dwelling. She didn't know if it was bravery, or something much worse. She felt hollowed out and ill at ease for the rest of the day; she should not have read the journal left open on the table.

The more time she spent on the rooftops, the more she learned that it was not solely her domain. The Bottle Street Gang placed a lookout up above the Bitterleaf Almshouse, but he was almost always dead drunk. Emily had robbed him of coin more than once. The Bottle Street Gang also had a hideout in one of the abandoned apartments overlooking Bloodox Way, and she stole food from there once in a while. Nothing much, just a tin or a fruit once in a while. She left the arsenal of ammo and mines intact, so they had no idea that it was not one of their own breaking in, but she did hear them bicker, occasionally, about restocking, and darkly muttering about gluttons.

If the Bottle Street Gang knew about her, it was only in wild anecdotes and paranoid ramblings. She tried not to let them see her, but she knew more than once that she'd transported herself away just a moment too late, and they'd caught her afterimage as she disappeared. They thought the rooftops were haunted by the spirit of some street urchin, and if that meant fewer of them ventured there, that suited Emily just fine.

They preferred keeping to the ground, anyway, and as Emily flitted above the heads of a couple of thugs, she heard the strangled call for help.

She stopped, teetering on a pipe, uncertain if she should get involved, but she peered down onto the street anyway, and tracked where the voice was coming from.

Two Bottle Street boys had boarded up the entrance of the old fishmonger's shop. Emily knew it was not technically a fishmonger's shop anymore, that a man called Griff had set up instead, and traded in any kind of tidbits people were willing to sell or buy. She'd never met the man face to face, but she knew he was harmless enough.

He probably hadn't been paying his protection tax. Emily knew the Bottle Street Gang sent their muscle to knock down every door in the Distillery District, Granny's included. So far they hadn't managed to extract anything from Granny--and likely wouldn't like what Granny gave them anyway--but Griff was apparently easier prey.

What were they going to do, she wondered. Keep him trapped until he died? Until he withered away inside his own shop? Would anyone come to save Griff? Would anyone even care if he died?

As she did when she was in doubt, she took out the Heart, and she considered what it had to say. ' _An honest man – no. But his heart is not as black as some_.'

Emily closed her eyes, brought the Heart to her cheek. It felt warm in her hands, but cold against the rest of her skin. She knew she could go, leave without anyone noticing her, and without anybody knowing she could have intervened. But the secret would still be in her heart, and would curdle there.

She put the Heart away, and peered through the walls with her dark vision before reaching and climbing through the window of the Bottle Street Gang's armory. 

The two gangsters were still in front of the boarded up door when she emerged again, and she slunk around them at an angle. Their backs were to the door, keeping a watch of the street, but that worked very well for the plan Emily had hatched. 

It was the work of seconds, a quick far reach to land her right behind the two men, and she reared on the first with a sleep dart she'd stolen from their own stash, stabbing it right in the meaty back of his thigh.

He flinched, making a short surprised sound, and startling the other man, but by the time the second fumbled for his sword, Emily crossed the distance in two steps and stabbed a sleep dart into his thigh as well--and then another far reach took her back up to the rooftops, beyond the range of their acid bottles.

The two men swayed on their feet, belligerent, but clumsy and slow as they grasped wildly for their weapons. They barely had both swords in hand when they collapsed to the ground, in twin graceless heaps.

Emily heard Griff's confused voice from inside his shop ("What?! Who--") and she daintily touched down on the street again when she was sure it was safe. The sedated men did not move as she walked past them.

"Are you alright?" Emily asked, peering through the slats. Griff looked astounded, perhaps at the realization that he'd seen two armed thugs taken out by a little girl with a couple of darts.

"I am!" he nodded, jittery but grateful. "But the door, though. I don't suppose there's anything you can do about that?"

He gave a rueful smile, like he didn't truly expect it, but Emily had an idea about that as well.

"You should step back, this is probably going to be dangerous," she said, and picked up a bottle off one of the unconscious men. I was filled with river krust acid, and Emily had seen them in action. She stepped far back before she threw the bottle at the wooden boards.

The bottle shattered spectacularly, and the acid burst into flames against the wood, making short work of it.

After the fire guttered out, Griff kicked off the final few boards, and squeezed out through the hole, making sure not to brush against the smoking edges.

"I owe you, girl," he said. "And I'll return the favor. Come by Griff's shop, that's my business." He eyed her warily. "You're a bit shorter than my usual clientele, but it's not like I can be picky. I'm reduced to scavenging from here and there, as the city dies. If you need anything, I wouldn't mind trading for a little money."

"Thank you," Emily said politely. "You should probably try to stay out of trouble, though. The Bottle Street Gang's dangerous. You could have gotten seriously hurt."

Griff laughed, before he trailed off and scratched a stubbly cheek.

"Hrm, well, it feels like I should be the one saying that to you, but thanks all the same. I'll, ah, keep it in mind. Miss," he appended, seemingly confused about why he felt the need to add a mode of address.

Emily nodded once, and then turned to leave. She used a far reach before she remembered that she was trying to avoid being seen using magic, but then, she didn't think Griff would tell on her.

' _Yes_ ,' the Heart murmured, ' _he saw what you did. But he will pretend he did not._ '

 

* * *

 

Emily found herself developing a routine of sorts, though her periods of sleep were haphazard: nights, mornings, afternoons, depending on when she went out and how much effort she expanded. She learned the Distillery District until it felt as familiar as Dunwall Tower, but in ever-widening loops, she found herself venturing further and further away, exploring Dunwall by roof and by foot.

She brought things back, little items to barter to Griff, bones for Granny, food and elixir and assorted items for herself. Clothes, when she needed them, sometimes books or notebooks that she filled with drawings. Toys lost their appeal, though she once brought back a pretty pair of whalebone tea cups, and Granny insisted on a tea party. Emily wasn't sure what the liquid Granny poured into the cups was, but it wasn't tea. She didn't try to drink it.

Granny was always delighted by the bits of bone Emily brought her. Emily would come across the whalebone carved and left on the shrine sometimes, and she wondered where Granny had ever learned to make runes.

Emily learned new tricks as well. Her far reach extended in range as she collected more runes, and she discovered that now time slowed as she fell if she tried to use her far reach at the same time. It saved her skin at least once, and amazed her every subsequent time she tried to replicate the effect. Once cornered in an alley by weepers, she discovered she could turn into a wraith, and lope across the ground nearly unseen, or squeeze through air vents like a rat.

She learned about bonecharms, as well. Not on purpose, or at least, not at first. But she watched the way Granny's hands worked the bones, the things she scribbled into them, how she tied them together just so like she was carefully putting the bow on a gift. Granny noticed her watching one day, and tilted her bonecharm towards Emily, tracing loving fingers over the bones. 

"Bring me more, and I can teach you such things as to strip the flesh of your enemies," Granny promised sweetly. "Or your loved ones," she shrugged. "Whichever you'd prefer."

"That doesn't sound very nice," Emily said.

"Sweet child," Granny smiled, her lips peeling back humorlessly to reveal flat, dull teeth--yet a chill traveled down Emily's back all the same. "But a young lady should cultivate her skills to the best of her ability. How else is she going to impress her suitors?"

Emily had heard that kind of thing before--perhaps it was the kind of pablum every young lady of station was fed by her tutors at one point or another--but she didn't think anyone had ever meant it the way Granny did.

It wasn't that Emily didn't understand how useful bonecharms could be. She had found a few herself; to sneak more stealthily, to enhance her Void powers, for food to be more filling and water more restorative. She kept them in pockets, or in her pouches, or clumsily stuffed into the lining of her jacket. But that was different from letting Granny teach her anything.

The Outsider agreed it was a double-edged sword. She found one of his shrines in the walls of an abandoned apartment, and he questioned whether she would accept Granny's offer anyway.

"Granny Rags offers something she has only given to one before, and you have the potential to far exceed her previous apprentice in skill. But will you? What are you willing to do to survive? What are you willing to do to take back your throne? Do you even care to try anymore, or do you relinquish your crown to rule nothing but Dunwall's rooftops? I suppose we will have to wait and see. I will be watching with interest, Your Highness."

Then he disappeared, along with that smirk of his, the one that reminded her that he knew so many things she did not.

It stung Emily to be reminded of how little she could accomplish on her own. Could she become a witch, like Granny Rags, and take the throne back by force? How many years would that take? What would happen to Corvo while she was busy doing this? What would happen to Dunwall?

What other choices did she even have?

 

* * *

 

In the end, if Emily made a choice, it was because she was reminded that despite the Outsider's words, she did not rule the rooftops.

She'd grown bold in the month since receiving her Mark, and more confident with the feeling of tiles under her soles. She became better at climbing by hand, when she traveled far afield of the Distillery District and wanted to conserve her magic for the trip back. It wasn't always fun, and the skin of her palms suffered a great deal until calluses built up, but she could feel herself get better at it.

She only just pulled herself over the lip of the roof when she spotted him from behind. The gray-coated Whaler, crouched at the other side of the roof.

Emily didn't understand what she was seeing until she was already sitting on the edge, straddling and assessing whether she should continue on her way by sneaking past the man, or just climb back down. He was facing the other way from her, looking down onto a street, but then he turned his head just so, just enough to reveal the outline of the whaler's mask poking out from under his hood.

Emily blanched, but did not make a sound. She froze like a rabbit at the shriek of a hawk. She recalled nothing so much as the splash of blood against flagstones, the hands grabbing at her--the masks. They'd all been wearing the masks, except for the one they answered to, the one they called Daud. She learned little else about them before she was handed to the Pendletons.

The Heart appeared in Emily's hand, not consciously summoned, but cradled to her chest nonetheless, as if it could provide any protection.

' _One of Daud's assassins_ ,' it whispered in warning. ' _They are everywhere, and nowhere._ '

Emily involuntarily whimpered, and she saw the Whaler's head twitch up, turn to look--

Before he'd fully turned, Emily was nothing but smoke and shadow, her black claws pulling her across the ground as she crawled away to the far end of the roof. Her heart was a slower, stranger thing in this form, but if it could beat out of her chest, it would have. 

It wasn't dark enough yet, no real shadows to head for, and the Whaler had risen to his feet, sword out as he turned to investigate. He spotted her, and he stumbled back with a startled shout as he saw her. Emily had never seen her own wraith form, but she could guess a great deal about it just based on the reaction of people who did see her. She could guess a great deal based on the fact that even a Whaler reacted in this way. The figures of Emily's own nightmares, shuddering in fright at the sight of her for a change.

She did not have time to savor it. She made for the nearest ledge, crawled over it, and pulled herself over. She used her far reach to drop onto a balcony safely, and then she used another one to take her deep into a dark alley.

She squeezed herself into a corner behind a dumpster in that alley, knees pulled to her chest, listening for any footsteps. It was well past dark when she realized nobody was going to come looking for her, and she made her way back to Granny Rags' house.

The next day, she brought Granny a piece of whalebone, and asked to learn.

"Oh, dearie, how nice of you to give a poor, old woman the time of day," Granny had crooned, her fingers caressing the whalebone. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in canon the extent of Emily and Granny Rags' interactions is that, after you rescue Emily from the Golden Cat, she has a line that implies Granny Rags led Emily down to the river and to Samuel's boat. Which I found kind of fascinating, with Granny Rags being such a weirdly chaotic neutral sort of character: she's super nice to you as long as you don't do anything to cross her, but then if you do piss her off, her revenge is absolutely terrible (and sometimes... involves... cannibalism). 
> 
> Also, I realized while writing this chapter that Granny Rags has likely been using her Void gaze to get by ever since she went blind (or her version of the power, anyway.) She must have upgraded that power with like a gazillion runes by now, but hey, when you make your own, you can probably afford it.


	3. Tag

The bones sang.

Emily didn't know what notes they hummed, because it wasn't a song that could be heard out loud. But Emily knew they didn't sound quite right, so she carved another small symbol along the edge of a bone, scraping it with a pocket knife over and over until it took shape, and brushing a finger to clear the shavings. A note changed, and she thought she was closer to... something. 

Then the banging on the door started again.

Emily sighed. The Bottle Street Gang was attempting once again to extract its protection tax from Granny. She didn't know why they still tried, especially since Emily came home one evening to find three sets of clothing neatly arranged on Granny's table, and Granny stirring a pot. Emily recognized the mode of dress as something distinctly Bottle Street Gang-like, and made sure not to eat anything Granny served that night.

"Open up," came the shout from outside, "this is the City Watch."

Emily blinked. That was new. She set aside the bonecharm, and approached the balcony door, peering out over the street through the grate of the balcony floor.

Three men of the City Watch, one of them an officer, waited crankily outside the door.

"I don't think there's anyone in," one of the watchmen said, apparently eager to move on.

"Check every house, that was the order," the officer said firmly.

" _Every_ house? Will you be marching in alongside us when we get to the weeper dens, _sir_?" one of the watchmen asked the officer.

"Don't be smart with me," the officer shot back, but he didn't actually answer the question.

Emily quietly retreated back inside, unseen.

She suspected she knew why they were checking every house. She hadn't been paying close attention to the Golden Cat, but she knew the Pendletons were in a tizzy after she escaped, just by listening to gossip. The other day, she'd picked up a newspaper, a few days old, but the headline announced that the Lord Regent would intensify efforts to locate the heir to the throne, Emily Kaldwin, after efforts to extract her location from the 'traitorous former Lord Protector' had failed. Geoff Curnow had been given full power of martial law in this respect, and apparently a new set of Sokolov devices for the Watch to use.

If she had been properly missing, Emily knew these kinds of efforts would have been made at the beginning of her disappearance, not six months in. But the heads of the conspiracy had known where she was until she escaped, and now that they did not, they were well and truly throwing into the search. Her disappearance had served them until now, she knew. It had allowed the Parliament and the public to ignore all manner of power abuses, as long as it was with the goal of finding her. But the longer she was missing, the less permissive both Parliament and the public opinion became. They'd been planning to milk her disappearance for a few more weeks before victoriously presenting her as found, and garnering yet more goodwill that they could abuse. But now she was well and truly gone, and to Emily, the conspirators' panic was almost palpable.

She couldn't let herself be found, least of all by the City Watch. Worse yet, she couldn't let them step into the house, because even though Granny wasn't here, she still had a shrine to the Outsider in the back yard, and the accouterments of a witch littered throughout the building. These men weren't Overseers, but they could tattle to the Abbey all the same.

Emily ran downstairs, taking the steps in her shadow form as to make no sound at all, and she glided to a stop at the first level.

What she needed was in the sink, the pot filled with the disgusting viscera that Granny fed to her little 'birdies'. She inhaled deeply and held her breath as she approached and picked up the pot. It was heavy and she took great pains not to spill anything over the rim, but she eventually ran out of breath to hold, and inhaled the disgusting smell of the offal, gasping and gagging as she tried to keep her bile down.

The watchmen banged on the door again.

"Hello, we can hear you! Open this door! It's the City Watch."

Emily place the pot next to the door, waving so the smell wafted as much as possible under the door and through the keyhole. She drew in breath--stopped herself from gagging--and then, just as she heard the weepers do, she let out a long, agonized groan.

She peered through the keyhole to see the watchmen react. One of them stumbled back, but the officer remained firm.

"Do you smell that?" one of the watchmen asked.

"Everything in this district smells bad, Culthers. Stay on task," the officer chided. Then he yelled towards the door, "You, in there! Come out!"

Emily would have to play her other card, then.

"Hello?" she called out, making her voice scratchy and weak. "Hello, are you here to bring the medicine?"

She saw the men hesitate outside the door.

"You sick, girl?" one of them asked, not unkindly.

"Granny went out to get the medicine," Emily said, her voice as sad and pathetic as she could make it. She let out a whimper, like crying. "She locked the door, and I don't have the key. Please, do you have the medicine? My eyes won't stop bleeding, my granny will be mad that I stained my good shirt."

She'd perhaps laid it on a bit thick, but even the officer looked shaken now.

Trying to refrain from laughing, Emily started scratching her nails against the door, and let out another long, pained groan.

"Pleaaaaase, someone please hellllp," she wailed, throwing in a few sobs for good measure.

All three men now stepped back from the door, alarmed.

"Sorry, girl," the officer said. "We're no doctors."

He shook his head, and as they hastily departed, Emily faintly heard the officer say he would make a note to send the dead counters this way.

Emily slumped against a wall, laughing quietly to herself, for the first time in quite a while.

 

* * *

 

The city got harder to navigate. The curfews were more strictly enforced than ever, and the City Watch was being sent into even the most wretched parts of Dunwall, to turn over the homes of everyone from nobility, to the city's lowest wretches. 

Worse than ever: tallboys were deployed, terrifying striders with no regard for anyone on the ground, and they were no longer being kept just to the well-heeled neighborhoods in order to protect the rich and privileged. They were sent to the slums now as well, to quietly terrify, as the watchmen checked every house by foot.

Emily had learned to avoid eyes from windows, to check for Whalers and keep her distance, she had even learned the hazards of patrolling watchmen on roofs as of late. The tallboys were the strangest hazard yet, and something about them filled her with dread all on its own. She could be up above everyone, and then a tallboy would turn a corner, and she would be directly in his line of sight, like a fruit ripe for picking.

She found herself listening closely for the clack of their stilts against the streets, and despairing of this new restriction on her freedom.

 

* * *

 

Emily had nightmares. Of course she did. She had had them before, at the Golden Cat, when the only thing to haunt her was a sword through her mother's chest, the arc of blood as it was pulled out. 

She'd had plenty more to fuel them since then, the sights and smells and heavy, dark knowledge of what life in Dunwall brought to its least fortunate. Death did not haunt her so much as suffering did. Dreams about waking up with trails of bloody tears down her face; the image of Corvo in shackles, after she heard what they did to people in Coldridge; hands out of darkness, or rats, or men on stilts of bone, their faces skeletal and accusing. Her mother still alive, but bleeding out slowly over the months, as everybody forgot she was still in the pavilion, hands still reaching out for Emily.

She flinched awake and often sat shivering on her mattress, under her ratty blanket, afraid to move lest something jump out at her from the darkness.

It was slightly better when she woke up and it was day, light coming in through the balcony doors. Then, she would rise, and take out a notebook to scribble in it.

She'd been writing down Granny's lessons, more diligently than she ever had her old tutors' lessons. Economics and politics and etiquette had always been a bore to her, but she found natural philosophy interesting, and she discovered witchcraft was a little bit like that. The natural philosophy of magic. The symbols had meaning, and the geometry could be learned. There was even some drawing involved, and she had always been good at drawing.

Granny also seemed sharper somehow when teaching her these things, her scattered brains coming together. From somewhere in her pile of junk, she'd fished out an old, leather-bound journal, the edges of the pages wavy with old water damage. When she cracked it open for the first lesson, it was to a page with strange symbols set into neat tables.

"You will learn these to begin with," Granny had said, startlingly coherent. "It is the oldest known Pandyssian alphabet. Each symbol represents both a letter, and a word."

Emily had looked at the symbols, something faintly familiar about the shapes. She's seen them before, carved on bonecharms.

"They must be very short words," Emily said. 

A slow smile had spread across Granny's face, and her fingers grasped Emily's chin. 

"You should know by now, dearie, that good things come in small packages," the old woman crooned, her voice somewhere between the sharp lucidity and the sickly-sweet pretense of innocence.

Emily shook Granny off, and went about transcribing the symbols in her own notebook, careful to get them just right. The ones she'd seen on bonecharms varied wildly at times, the shapes warped just a bit by each person who carved them, but Emily made sure she transcribed them just as they looked in Granny's journal. The page opposite the table of symbols had instructions on how each should be written, which loops and angles were important, and a short pronunciation guide: 'kuh', 'ti', 'ma', so on, each one  short bark of a sound that had once been a word in a language nobody spoke anymore.

And when Granny wasn't paying as much attention, perhaps Emily flipped to some other pages in the journal, devouring whole paragraphs of long accounts of a journey to Pandyssia, and of horrors and wonders discovered there. In these furtive glimpses, she learned a name. Vera Moray.

 

* * *

 

Pandyssia began making room for itself in her nightmares. The accounts of monsters, tombs, ravenous curses with lives of their own began insinuating themselves in Emily's thoughts, but as the days went on, these dreams seemed more strange than frightening. 

One time, after she finally woke up from a dream, she picked up the bonecharm she was working on, and she was spurred by some impulse to finish it. She'd been dreaming of walking down the corridor of a tombs, her fingers dragging along the walls over carved letters. She'd had this dream a few times before, but this time she managed to recognize and read every single letter she saw.

She had her notebook open on her knees, but she hardly needed to look at it as her pocketknife quickly gouged two new symbols along the curving edge of the bone.

The song changed key, the notes came together; Emily brought it to her ear, and it sounded _just right_.

It promised to keep her nightmares away.

 

* * *

 

After the first bonecharm, the others seemed to come easier. Emily knew what she was doing now, and she made three others in quick succession. Two of them, she sold to Griff, but a third one--meant to keep rats from biting her--she kept and pinned inside her jacket.

The lessons with Granny Rags slowly drifted from the specifics of bonecharms, to the basics of spellwork. With a hand so steady it belied her age, Granny drew perfect circles, and filled them to overflowing with Pandyssian words and letters, whole novels' worth of them. It made Emily dizzy to look at them too long, and slightly daunted at the notion that she would be expected to replicate such work.

"Mustn't bite off more than you can chew, dearie," Granny told her. "You'll start on something small."

It was a basic thing, a circle split in five parts, and each slice of it meant to have one diagram. Granny explained the meaning and usage of each image--the rat, the tree, the offering, the skull, the crossed scythe-and-pitchfork--but she made Emily figure out how they were meant to go together, what words she was meant to add to the image once she drew it.

"How do I know if I've done it right?" Emily asked.

"You'll know you've done it well if it works," Granny replied. "Go now."

Emily blinked at this.

"You... want me to use it? On someone?" she asked. "For real?"

"There's no better way to learn, dearie," Granny replied, and a slow smile spread across the face. She tilted her head just so, her blind gaze peering right past Emily. "And if you fail--well. Hopefully you'll survive the attempt. You'd make a poor apprentice if this little party trick was enough to overwhelm you."

"But isn't this a spell for hurting someone?" Emily persisted.

"Yes, dearie," Granny agreed, deceptively mild. "So you best find someone you want hurt."

Emily had found the notion galling at first, but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What did she expect to learn from Granny, if not a great deal of things that would help her survive, if not fight for her throne? At some point, it might not even be much of a choice; she would perhaps need to hurt someone. And at least this spell didn't seem meant to kill them.

That evening found Emily on Clavering Boulevard, crouched on a balcony with chalk in her hand, hastily scribbling on a wall. The circle turned out a bit crooked, the drawing inside it a bit squashed as a result, but she wrote each letter precisely, as if to compensate. She activated the circle once she was done, just as Granny taught her, and the circle flashed, her Mark lighting up in sympathy. Then in one far reach she was away, up on a roof, to watch her handiwork.

One side effect of the increased security throughout Dunwall was that now there were tallboys almost everywhere, and one appeared soon enough, in long mechanical strides, to pass by Emily's circle.

She activated her dark vision belatedly, on a hunch, and she caught the tail end of some wild energy, like black lightning jumping from the circle and onto the tallboy.

Then, for lack of better explanation, the tallboy fell apart: its spotlight went out, and its legs popped its screws one by one, the spindly stilts folding in half and coming apart. The man in the tallboy suit let out a shriek as he began descending towards the ground, but managed to brace and roll, already several feet away when the tanks hit the cobbles and exploded. He scurried away in animal panic, unscathed but clearly shaken.

After weeks of feeling personally terrorized by the tallboys, Emily couldn't help the sense of victory that buoyed her. She skipped along rooftops all the way back to Endoria Street, and ran up to Granny Rags chattering happily about what she'd done.

Granny seemed pleased enough, all gracious smiles and strange compliments, and Emily was still so giddy that it took her a few minutes to notice Granny was packing a valise with her few precious items.

"Are you going somewhere, Granny?" Emily asked, her mouth going dry. If Granny left... then what was going to happen to her?

"Of course, dear," Granny said. "This place has gotten so dreary, has it not? The neighbors alone are terrible. A change of scenery will do us both good, don't you agree?"

"Oh. Oh! I can come too, then?" Emily asked, not sure why she felt quite so happy at the notion.

"Naturally, dearie," Granny said, crooning as her hand pressed against Emily's cheek. "How could I possibly leave without my little birdie? Oh, how you'll love the summer home. It's where the best memories are made."

Emily felt entirely too happy about being brought along, and against all reason, she would still feel pleased even after she discovered that Granny relocated them to a hideout in the sewers. It hardly mattered; she had so much to learn now.

 

* * *

 

For a brief time, it almost seemed like her life hit some sort of equilibrium. She was getting better at scavenging and figuring out what was valuable to sell, and her mental map of Dunwall was getting more detailed by the day, now starting to include its sewer system as well.

So, as she did each time her life reached such a point, she wondered what next. In a fit of bravery, she decided to scout out Coldridge Prison, but to her dismay, she discovered there was music like from the Overseers' music boxes playing over loudspeakers around the prison. It made her head feel wretched, and it blocked her magic powers, so whatever half-baked plan she'd had, she abandoned.

She felt--utterly silly, whatever she'd been thinking. She was only a fool little girl, and the thought that she could break into a prison and try to rescue Corvo became more ridiculous the more she turned it over.

It reminded her once again how few adults in the world she could truly trust. Would Anton Sokolov help her? He had been a good Royal Physician, but the Lord Regent was letting him deploy every device Jessamine ever forbid him from using, and Emily couldn't wager her freedom on the chance that Anton wasn't bought and sold already, every bit the Lord Regent's man.

Captain Curnow? He was considered a fair man, incorruptible. Corvo had always liked him, the way Corvo always liked honest men, but these were dishonest times, Emily found. She was dodging too many City Watch patrols to fully trust in Geoff Curnow anymore. The Lord Regent and Overseer Campbell both were being very vocal in the press about how Curnow was taking the charge in the search for Emily. This seemed like some sort of ploy to Emily, like they were planning to pass the blame to Curnow if she was never found, but she couldn't bet Curnow wasn't in on it anyway.

Emily thought on the list of courtiers and members of Parliament that she could recall--something she had never truly paid enough attention to, and now regretted the lapse. But she couldn't think of one she trusted. Her mother had trusted many people once; she had even trusted Hiram Burrows.

Who did Emily have anymore? The Outsider, who had given her these gifts, yet could not intervene on her behalf? Granny Rags, who taught her awful things, and who allowed Emily to live under her protection in exchange for a few baubles? Griff, maybe, who was just a poor common man trying to survive? He'd always been kind, but Emily couldn't rightly imagine any way in which he would be helpful for taking back the throne. 

No. There was just Corvo that she trusted anymore. And Corvo was not here.

And maybe even Corvo would not have been able to save her from what happened next.

 

* * *

 

It didn't seem like it was going to be a particularly dangerous day in Dunwall. The sky was a clear blue, and a cold breeze from the sea cut  through the smell of the plague.

Emily was basking in the beauty of morning sunlight falling over Dunwall, and paused on top of a building in the Legal District Waterfront, to watch the gentle lap of waves, and scarf down a tin of jellied eels. It was quiet. It was almost too quiet, and partway through her quick breakfast, Emily started feeling like maybe she was being watched. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she thought she glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye.

Unsettled, Emily dropped the tin of jellied eels, barely finished, and it rang strangely loud in the quiet. She wiped her fingers on her pants, with little regard for her clothes anymore, and turned to leave. 

She heard it then, the delicate 'tink' as a sleep dart shot past her and hit the tiles of the roof instead. Emily flinched, realizing immediately that she was still awake only by the magic of her most recent bonecharm--it could make projectiles miss her, but only on the first shot. It would not help with a second. She turned to run towards the edge of the roof, hand extending for a far reach onto the next building, but before she even got into range, a Whaler appeared in front of her, and his arms locked around her like iron bands.

Emily had taught herself to be quiet, to delay panicked reactions, but suddenly it was eight months ago, and she'd just seen her mother with a sword through her heart, and arms were grabbing and dragging her away again.

She shrieked, kicking and flailing as hard as she'd done before. The Whaler lifted her feet off the ground, thinking that would give him some sort of advantage, but really it just freed Emily's legs to kick harder. Emily's Mark flared as she tried to use her far reach, to hook into something and slip out of his arms, but she could feel the magic spill to the Whaler holding her, and knew that she'd only manage to transport him along with her. She had to get free of him first.

"Dammit--" the Whaler holding her hissed, as she repeatedly kicked her heel against his knee, "Stop it, or I'm putting a sleep dart through your neck!"

Emily got another good kick in before she stopped struggling, but it wasn't for the Whaler's sake that she did. She froze, horrified, as a figure of her nightmares stepped forward, flanked by two Whalers, one in red and one in blue. It was Daud.

As Emily stopped struggling, the Whaler lowered her feet back to the ground, though his arm was still around her, holding tight.

"Emily Kaldwin," Daud rasped, his mouth twisting to a bitter smile. "You're a hard one to find."

He reached forward, and grasped her left hand, and Emily flinched belatedly, tried to pull back, no matter how futile it felt. Daud peeled off the fingerless glove from her hand, exposing the Mark, and his eyebrows went up, then lowered into a frown again.

"And I see the black-eyed bastard has taken an interest," Daud said, anger clear in his voice.

Emily tugged her hand back, and he let her, but then he looked at her, staring her in the eye, and Emily shrank back, wishing she hadn't done anything to draw his attention.

"The Lord Regent has been turning the city inside out looking for you," Daud said, his voice no longer angry, but still a gruff rumble. "I suppose this explains how you managed to slip through his fingers in the first place. Something to discuss, once you're safe." He turned half-away from her, signaling his Whalers.

Emily felt her fear ratchet higher at the thought that Daud was going to just hand her right back to the Lord Regent and the Pendletons and her prison at the Golden Cat. With sudden strength born out of fear, she reared with all her might and kicked the Whaler holding her as hard as possible.

He grunted in pain, his arms loosening only a fraction, but he didn't release her--so with a flash of her Mark, she turned into a shadow, slipped through his arms like she was nothing more than a plume of smoke, and poured down to the ground.

She heard the alarmed shouts as she scurried between their legs, and she heard the clink of sleep darts as they whizzed past her, missing her malleable shadow body as it writhed across the roof.

She didn't stop, she simply ran blindly towards the edge of the roof, and jumped into the building's water spout, sliding down it as she would through a vent, and pouring out onto the cracked pavement of the back alley. There were more Whalers there, popping into the alley as they gave chase, Daud alongside them, trying to cut her off.

She wouldn't be able to maintain this form for long, and she needed to get away before they cornered her. In a fit of panic, she reached out a smoky claw, grabbed a Whaler by the ankle and pulled him clean off his feet, hurling him through the air and smacking him into a wall.

Emily was almost as startled by it as the Whalers were; she didn't know her shadow form had that kind of strength. She'd barely even felt the Whaler's weight.

It made the rest of them hesitate, at least for a moment.

"Don't hurt the girl," Daud barked, and Emily almost gave a hysterical laugh at the notion. Don't hurt her? She'd just hurt one of _them_!

She twisted away, wheeling back the other way, but the alley was a dead end in that direction, and there were no vents she could squeeze through, so she twisted back around, barreling towards the Whalers, claws-first.

The other Whalers flinched, but not Daud, who threw something to the ground before stepping aside, making a clear opening for her.

Emily didn't stop to think, she only made for the opening, and she didn't realize until it was too late that the object Daud threw was some sort of mine. As she glided over it, she was caught in an arc of electricity, and it felt much like she was kicked in the chest, and dropped right out of her shadow form, back into the shape of a small girl as she rolled onto the street.

She was disoriented, not sure which way up, but she fought to stay conscious, and keep running. Her body didn't respond quite right, hands clumsy and senseless, as she braced against the ground to lift herself up, and she couldn't tell if her legs were even moving.

"That's enough," she heard Daud grouse, and it was probably his hands coming around her shoulders as she was lifted from the ground. "We're not here to hurt you, hard as that may be to believe. Try not to injure yourself either."

Emily felt like a rag doll, and tears started prickling her eyes, as she realized that all the Outsider's gifts would not save her from this assassin. Frustration made a tight knot in her throat, and she couldn't even kick Daud to make herself feel better. She got her legs under her and managed to stand, but her legs were jelly, and only Daud's grip on her upper arms was keeping her upright.

Then there was a thump, then, and Daud released her suddenly with a muffled curse.

Emily fell to her knees, the shock of pain from the impact running up her spine, and she craned her neck to look backwards, trying to figure out what had happened.

Whatever Emily expected to see, it was not three giant vines emerged from the ground, walloping the Whalers. One of them had hooked into Daud, and was pulling him into what Emily guessed was optimal thrashing range. He managed to unsheathe his sword, but his angle was awkward, and ineffective. The other Whalers were doing little better against the unexpected assault.

Emily watched the spectacle for only a few seconds, no matter how enjoyable. This would be the best opportunity to run, and she was going to take it.

As her head turned back around, however, a woman appeared in front of her, and Emily managed to get only the glimpse of beautiful flowers along her lapels before the strange woman's arms came around Emily, and they disappeared together.


	4. Gingerbread House

Brigmore Manor was achingly beautiful, and Emily didn't simply think so just because she'd spent several months getting acquainted with Dunwall's ugliest nooks and crannies, though it certainly helped that this place seemed so untouched by the plague. She'd forgotten what air smelled like without the pungent miasma of plague, and death, and rats. She breathed in deeply, feeling like it was the first time her lungs had filled in months.

There were more witches at Brigmore Manor, and they came out to meet Delilah at the gates, curious and bubbling with excitement.

"Did I not tell you, sisters," Delilah said, "that Daud would led us straight to her? We took her right from under his nose."

A few of the witches tittered, and all of them were impressed. They swarmed around Emily, the strange women covered by vines and flowers, and they cooed and prodded at Emily like the courtiers did the first time she was introduced at court. After months of keeping very little company, and even that not always friendly, Emily found herself feeling overwhelmed by the attention.

"So skinny," one of them tutted.

"Poor thing, she's filthy," another remarked, rubbing a spot off Emily's cheek. 

"And those rags she's wearing, those must be burnt," another agreed.

"A bath, first thing."

Emily looked towards Delilah, clearly alarmed.

"Go with them, dear," Delilah said, shooing her along. "I have some things I must tend to, but I'll be along."

"Okay," Emily agreed, even though she felt strangely apprehensive about being separated from Delilah. She'd only gotten to know the woman a little bit, on the boat ride to Brigmore. She knew only in the vaguest details that she'd been her mother's childhood friend, but what weighed the heaviest in Delilah's favor was that she'd rescued Emily right out of Daud's clutches. 

But if Delilah trusted these women, then so would Emily, and she let herself be packed off by the fussing women.

In truth, it wasn't like Emily would have minded a bath anyway. Her hygiene had been haphazard over the past few months. She washed herself any opportunity she could find, often with washcloths at the sinks of abandoned apartments where the water hadn't been turned off yet, a handful of quick baths. But winter was cold and rainy in Dunwall, and it often made Emily loathe to peel off too many layers.

An old copper tub, in one of Brigmore Manor's lower rooms, was filled with water from a nearby pond. The water was completely cold, and tinged brown-green, until one of the witches dropped a few leaves in the water, and muttered something, and the water started bubbling and boiling. It went on for a few minutes, and Emily watched, fascinated. She hoped they weren't planning to boil and eat her, though logically she knew Delilah wouldn't have allowed that. Granny Rags may have given Emily some interesting notions about what witches got up to.

But the water stopped its ominous bubbling, and while steam rose in delicate strings from the surface, the water itself was clear all the way through, the cleanest Emily had seen since leaving the Golden Cat.

A couple of the witches went off, and came back with soap and bathsalts and a washcloth.

"See if this is warm enough for you," the witch who'd made the water boil said, pulling Emily closer to the tub.

Emily dipped her hand, and she was pleased to discover the water was hot, but not unbearably so. She shivered, not realizing how cold she'd been.

"I haven't had a hot bath in months," Emily admitted longingly.

"Well, get in, love, don't just stand there," the same witch huffed, uncorking the bottle of bathsalts and pouring in some of its contents.

Emily unhooked her belt with its pouches, placing it carefully on a nearby endtable. She was just as careful with her bonecharms, gathering them out of every hidden pocket and seam of her jacket, and placing them next to her belt. She was less careful with the rest of her clothing, shucking everything to the floor.

She sank into the hot water with a long, satisfied sigh, and lowered until the water was up to her chin. Dirt was already sloughing off her, and tinging the water, and Emily tilted her head back, dipping her hair into the water as well, and then scrubbing at her face.

The witches argued for a bit about her discarded clothing, and then most of them went off, leaving only two of their number behind. Emily learned one was named Evelyn, the other Tilda. 

Tilda was by far the most talkative of the two, and she offered to wash Emily's hair, while Evelyn merely sat down, on a stool next to the end table that Emily had piled her things on.

"Your hair is simply a mess," Tilda sighed, partly through lathering Emily's hair. "I shall have to get a comb. Don't go anywhere!"

Emily wasn't sure where precisely she would have gone, when the water was so comfortable, and her hair was a soapy pile on the top of her head, but she murmured ascent anyway as Tilda left the room.

There was no real door to the room anymore, though the hallway just outside turned so it provided adequate privacy. And Emily had had servants attend her during baths before, especially if she had to get ready for some important function. The witches seemed markedly different, however.

Evelyn was going through Emily's things, inspecting the bonecharms carefully, poking through the pouches. Emily was rankled by the rudeness at first, but Evelyn's expression was grave, like how Corvo got when he frisked someone for weaponry. She didn't seem to be doing this for her own satisfaction; perhaps she was doing it for Delilah's protection.

"Where did you get so many bonecharms, child?" Evelyn asked.

"I found some of them around Dunwall, and I made the rest myself," Emily replied.

Evelyn was surprised, and looked at Emily more closely now, as if seeing something new.

"Who taught you how to do this?" Evelyn asked.

"Granny Rags did," Emily replied, not thinking there was any reason she shouldn't reveal such a thing. These women were witches as well, so they might already know Granny anyway.

"That old bat?" Evelyn gave an incredulous laugh.

Emily was unpleasantly reminded of the children on Endoria Street, who would throw things, or crowd around Granny taunting. 

"She's dangerous, you know," Emily said after a long pause.

The amusement drained from Evelyn's face, and she considered the bonecharms for a few more moments, before putting the one she was holding back on the end table.

"Hm. Yes, well. Aren't we all," Evelyn said, her voice also subdued. She stared at the bonecharms, deep in thought.

Tilda rushed in just then, with a comb.

 

* * *

 

Emily soon found herself scrubbed clean, and with her hair combed. It fell down to her shoulders now, glossy clean and sweet smelling, the ends curling softly. Her scalp still stung with how fiercely Tilda had attacked it with the comb, but she was grateful for it.

The other witches eventually returned, with clothing just about fit for Emily's size: some stockings and underthings, a bit more grown-up than Emily had ever worn, a pair of fine gray trousers that Emily was a bit too skinny to fill out properly, even a white shirt that fit fairly well as long as she tucked the hems into her pants. Finally, an off-white jacket, which actually fit Emily well around the shoulders, despite being obviously tailored for someone with more to mention in the chest area. 

They let her keep only her boots, since they could not find shoes in Emily's size, and burned the rags that Emily had worn up until then.

Emily felt like an entirely different person by the end of it. They gave her things to eat after her bath, sweet Serkonan grapes and crisp apples, and then they showed her around Brigmore Manor.

The initial fairytale charm of the manor held up as Emily was shown the groves of trees, the backyard and the waterfall, even the dilapidated interior of the building. She was even shown and warned away from the river krusts which grew on the property. Fallen apart and overgrown, flooded and broken, it was still the kind of place Emily had only visited in her imagination, when her games of pretend at Dunwall Tower got particularly involved.

She was startled when they came across a hound's skull on the ground, and in a burst of sickly light, it suddenly begot itself a body and stalked closer.

"Ah, the gravehounds," one of the witches showing her around said. Her name was Naria. "Let them sniff you, love, they need to know you're welcome here."

Emily extended a hand shyly, as she would to a real hound.

The creature moved towards Emily, and as it lacked skin, she could see every jerky movements of its muscles, the way it seemed to remember the motions mechanically even if they did not come naturally to it anymore. Magic prickled in smoky strands along its back, where a hound's mane might stand on end.

Though Emily could see no tell-tale twitch of its nostrils, the gravehound still pressed it nose against the back of Emily hand, and she felt its breath, cold and dry where a living hound's would be warm and wet.

After sniffing Emily, it turned its head curiously to the witch, and Naria petted its head. Its tail was nothing but bare bone, but it wagged, in the same stiff parody of living motion, like a marionette's limb being operated.

"Should I pet it?" Emily asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"Do you want to?" Naria asked, apparently amused.

Emily nodded, stiffly. She couldn't quite help but be fascinated by the creature.

Naria took her hand, and placed it near the back of the skull, where it bordered the bare flesh. 

"They like it here best," Naria said.

Emily gave the spot a soft scratch, and was surprised at how dry the exposed muscle felt. She supposed it came from not having had skin in a long time. It reminded Emily of the Pandyssian mummies she'd furtively touched at the Academy of Natural Philosophy. 

"Are they in pain?" Emily asked, as she watched the gravehound's tail wag again. Did the hound even feel anything, or was this some reflex left over since it used to be alive?

"They do not feel much of anything anymore," Naria said, "except loyalty to those who raised them."

"Raised them?" Emily asked, picturing an entire litter of tiny puppy skulls turning into miniature gravehounds.

"Yes, dear, raised them from the dead," Naria nodded. "One simply requires a hound's skull and the correct spell. And magic, of course. Always magic."

"Oh," Emily perked up, "I know a bit of magic. Will I learn to make a gravehound?"

Naria smiled indulgently, and brushed her knuckles over Emily's cheek.

"That will be up to Delilah, my love. But you will not be required to learn magic. We will always be here to look out for you."

Emily wanted to argue that it wasn't that she didn't trust them, or that she thought she needed to learn, but it simply seemed an interesting thing to know. But if she needed to make that argument to Delilah, then she would do so later.

For now, she indulged in all the other questions she had. Did the gravehounds eat? Did they sleep? Did they play fetch? Could you make other grave animals if you had their skulls? Did they have to have muscles, or could you make a gravehound that was just a skeleton?

As the questions edged further into hypothetical, a few other witches were drawn into the conversation, and a fierce debate on magical theory kicked off, a little over Emily's head, even though she occasionally recognized some theoretical principle that she'd picked up from Granny Rags' lessons. Except Granny Rags had never been very straightforward in answering any question that didn't directly pertain to something she was trying to teach. Emily would pester her with questions about Pandyssia, about monsters and old dead cities she'd visited, and the old woman would choose that precise moment to either become enigmatic, or pretend at senility.

Emily realized with a start that Granny Rags might not even know yet about Emily's impromptu departure from Dunwall. A full day hadn't passed yet, and Emily's wandering took her away for longer at times. She felt mingled guilt and relief, and then guilt about her feelings of relief, but Granny Rags had always been a strange, dangerous creature to attach herself to. Emily had felt, at times, like one of the tiny fish who hooked onto the skins of leviathans or sharks, cleaning their teeth in exchange for safety. Emily did not want to think about what use Granny would have eventually found for her.

 

* * *

 

Life at Brigmore Manor, Emily discovered, was like an off-kilter revisitation of her childhood at Dunwall Tower. The witches carried on in their own anarchic, care-free way, waking when they wished and, outside their duties to Delilah, doing as they willed.

They had little concern for Emily herself. They gave Emily food if she requested it, and indulged her in questions sometimes, but otherwise let her roam the property like a wild thing.

It felt vaguely unreal to Emily, like the games of pretend she used to play in Dunwall Tower's garden and halls had been brought to life. She no longer had to imagine the game of exploration, as Brigmore Manor was still so new and strange, and though the witches were everywhere on the property, they did not pay attention to her as closely as the servants would. Sometimes if they were particularly bored or indulgent, they could be drawn into games, but they were in no way beholden to Emily, and just as likely to turn her away.

The first few days were instructive to Emily. She kept to the grounds, near the manor, and climbed every tree she could. This was still a novel experience to her: Dunwall did not have as many trees as Brigmore, and her climbing had been mostly along the geometrically predictable and unmoving architecture of a city. Trees were trickier, the branches uneven, prone to swinging under her weight. Even her far reaches couldn't quite hook onto branches as accurately.

The witches who saw her seemed amused at Emily's antics.

"Look, sister, she's like a Serkonan monkey," one said to another in a stage whisper, which nonetheless carried all the way up to Emily, tangled in the tree branches above them.

"You have never in your life seen a monkey," the other pointed out, not even bothering to lower her voice.

"I suppose I don't need to anymore," the first one drawled, looking up towards Emily with a toothy grin.

Emily, full of childish indignation, used a far reach to bring herself down in a crouch behind the witch who had called her a monkey, and poked her in the back.

"Boo!"

The witch shrieked, and swung around, shooting off thorns into empty air, because Emily was already up in the tree and out of range, albeit on a different branch than before. The second witch burst into raucous laughter which echoed across the courtyard.

Her face turning more red than green, the startled witch turned to glare up at Emily.

"Must've been a monkey," Emily said innocently.

The second witch burst into a new fit of laughter.

Others were more friendly towards Emily, especially if she was friendly towards them as well. One of the witches told her the sad story of a butler they found dead at the waterfall, and even though that was perhaps the kind of story her mother wouldn't have wanted her to hear, Emily felt herself more than mature enough to handle it now.

She found the manor's shed, and helped another witch re-pot some plants, and she was given a beautiful flower in exchange ("To press in a book," the witch had told her, as if imparting a secret). Emily held it delicately in her hand, the flower small and blue and feeling as delicate as cobwebs, and as advised, she found a book inside the manor to press it. It felt more valuable to her than any bejeweled gift from honored dignitaries; she had not been given beautiful things in a very long time.

 

* * *

 

 

Emily did not see much of Delilah for the first day. It was only around the second day that she managed to come across Delilah, as she was exploring the interior of Brigmore Manor and realized she was in the art gallery, working on some spell or other.

A stern-faced witch blocked Emily's path at first, her mouth twisting into cold disapproval, but Emily managed to catch Delilah's eye from the doorway.

"Is that dear Emily? Breanna, do let her in," Delilah said, and the witch--Breanna--softened visibly.

"Of course," Breanna said, gesturing Emily inside.

Emily approached Delilah, her breath coming in short. Delilah was unlike anyone Emily had ever met, even compared to all the other Brigmore witches. She carried herself like a lady of the court, and looked like a demigoddess from an ancient legend.

When Delilah turned her attention to Emily, the corner of her lip turned up in approval, and Emily's heart leapt in her chest.

"Ah, what an improvement," Delilah said, running her long fingers through Emily's hair. "It just wouldn't do for a future Empress to run around crusted with filth, now would it?"

"It was nice finally getting a real bath," Emily confessed with a sigh. "And Brigmore's nice too! I met almost everyone, I think? And the gravehounds. They don't have any eyes, you can see right into their heads. I've never seen inside a hound's head before."

Confronted with this sudden burst of words, Delilah blinked. Over the months, Emily had had very few occasions to truly talk as she wished, and now the chatter bubbled up from her unheeded.

"I'm so glad you're availing yourself of our hospitality," Delilah said, patting Emily's head a final time before her hand withdrew. "I hope your stay here is comfortable... at least until we have you back on the throne."

"I'm sure it will be," Emily said, but although she opened her mouth to continue, a thread of shyness stopped her.

"Go on, what is it?" Delilah smiled indulgently.

"I just... Thank you," Emily said, and on an impulse, she grabbed Delilah's hand. "You saved me from Daud."

Delilah's sleeves were studded with thorns, long and nasty, but the vines adorning her waist like a belt looked harmless, so Emily put her arms around Delilah's middle, squeezing close and hiding her face in Delilah's coat.

"Nobody else was going to come for me," Emily said, quietly. "But you did."

Delilah stiffened under Emily's arms at first, whether because she was surprised or uncomfortable with the sudden contact, but although she only relaxed fractionally after that, her hand came back up to comb fingers through Emily's hair.

"Poor child," Delilah said, her voice low, "I am the only thing you have left in the world, aren't I? Poor, unfortunate child."

Emily knew she still had Corvo, somewhere out there, but she didn't bring it up just then. He was still out of her reach, and Delilah was the one soothing the loneliness that Emily had been aching with since her mother's death. When she was Empress, she would find him and release him from any prison cell; but for that she needed to be Empress first.

So Emily let herself be soothed for as long as Delilah allowed, and, pathetically grateful for any affection she received, did not wonder one bit where Delilah's kindness was coming from.

 

* * *

 

If there was one thing that Emily regretted about being relocated to Brigmore Manor so suddenly, it was that she had lost her bonecharm that warded her against nightmares. She'd left it under her pillow in Granny's new lair in the sewers. She had most of her others, because she'd been keeping them either in her pouch, or in her various pockets when she ran into Daud and the Whalers. But she did not mourn the absence of any bonecharm as much as she did her Quiet Sleep one.

It was impractical to ask for it at this point. She had no intention of returning to Dunwall for it, and while she could technically explain to one of the witches how to get to Granny's lair, Emily wasn't exactly sure any of the Brigmore Witches short of Delilah could survive Granny's clutches. She didn't know if witches were territorial by nature, but Granny was only reasonable in a certain sense of the word.

The nightmares themselves were not any worse than they had been before; she had one during her second night at Brigmore, that she walked into an empty Dunwall Tower and found Granny Rags and her mother having dinner together, except her mother had a gravehound's skull instead of a face, and did not seem to notice.

After she woke up, huddled on a mattress against the wall, she stayed frozen in fear and watched the windows at the far side of the room. The branches of a tree outside cast shadows which looked like the long fingers of some otherworldly creature, and Emily understood sharply what people found so frightening about her shadow form.

She felt more sluggish the next day, but didn't let it hinder her exploration. She climbed trees, and then went to the back yard, to watch the waterfall as she chewed on a barely ripe Tyvian pear. 

That was where she was when two witches approached, engaged in some kind of heated, whispered exchange. Their conversation cut off before they were close enough for Emily to hear, however, and when she turned to look at them, their expressions were pleasant, revealing not much of anything.

"Emily, have you ever had these before?" one of the witches asked. Her name was Adelaide, if Emily wasn't mistaken, and when she extended her hand, she had two ripe, purple berries. They weren't anything Emily recognized, their shape oblong like grapes, but unevenly so. Their skin was almost iridescent, and Emily thought 'magic' even though she was unsure why.

"I don't think so," Emily said. "What are they?"

Adelaide smiled, though it looked more like she was flashing her canines.

"Would you like to try some?" Adelaide asked.

Emily found herself hesitating. It felt like a trap, or at bare minimum like a prank. She was about to turn the berries down.

"I grew them myself," the other witch added quietly, her voice softer and her expression self-effacing. Her name, if Emily remembered correctly, was Heloise. She didn't look at Emily, instead her eyes staring to the ground. Perhaps she was shy, Emily decided.

"Oh," Emily said. "I'm sure they're very good, then." To be encouraging, Emily picked up one of the berries and popped it into her mouth.

When she crushed it between her teeth, its juice was thick and coated the inside of her mouth like marmalade. It tasted like the color of refined whale oil, bright and blue and with an interior glow. When Emily swallowed, barely a mouthful, it seemed to fill her body completely on the inside, with a cold burn down to her toes.

"Take the other as well," Adelaide encouraged, her smile growing more satisfied.

Emily didn't know why she took the second one when the first was already too much, but she did. She bit down on it and wondered if she was aglow. She wondered if they could see it.

She keeled over into the grass, and Heloise cut off a shriek of surprise.

But Emily felt fine. She felt better than fine. She could feel the Void occupying the same space as the real world, like she was just now hearing the part of the choir that sang in a different key. She sank her fingers into the grass, which didn't exist in that Voidsong, and knew if she listened very hard, she would hear the whales.

As closely as she tried to listen, though, she was rudely interrupted by voices, blaring in her ear from the wrong side, slow and loud and distended across her senses like rubber melted in the sun.

"I told you it was a bad idea," Heloise was saying. "What if we've damaged her?"

"Nonsense, she seems to be having the trip of her life," Adelaide said.

It was unbearably loud, and Emily only wanted to listen for the whales. The two witches flinched when Emily's Mark flared, and they beat a hasty retreat when Emily turned into a shadow, and glided well away from them.

Her senses were muffled as a wraith, more than usual. Her field of vision, warped as it usually was, felt more natural, however, as if her state had finally made her own senses more comprehensible to her. It felt easier to think as a shadow, her thoughts anchoring more easily.

She didn't think she got very far before the transformation ran out its clock, and she was sprawled at the root of a tree, on her back and staring up at the sway of branches in the wind. She thought she was close to reading some wonderful revelation in the veins of the trees before her mind drifted away.

Emily woke again on her mattress, her mouth feeling as if it had been stuffed with cotton, and her head feeling too light and too heavy at the same time. She rolled over, scanning the room around her in shivery apprehension. But there was nobody there with her. 

Her room was only the half-collapsed remains of one, accessible through the splintered remains of the floor. Emily had found a musty mattress, among bits of rotten wood that may have once been a bed before collapsing in on itself. There was not much else there: an end table with a chipped basin, a small chest that Emily piled her belongings into. 

Someone had now also helpfully left a glass of water next to Emily's mattress, on the floor just beyond her reach, perhaps so she wouldn't knock it over on accident if she thrashed in her sleep.

Emily drank deeply of it, still thirsty even after all the water had passed through her parched throat. She didn't know who had brought her to her room, or who had left her the water, but she knew who had played the cruel trick on her to begin with, and that was when Emily began understanding that the witches might have been Delilah's creatures, but they were not Emily's friends.

 

* * *

 

A few days later, when Emily found some of her explorations stymied (there was a rune somewhere in the water, but it was too close to one of the river krusts), she turned her attention to the manor's interior. Collapsed corridors and rooms created a maze, pathways going through holes in the ceilings or floors as often as straight through. Some doorways were barricaded by old furniture, some doors locked. Finding her way and learning all the turns and dead ends was entertainment enough to Emily.

She was somewhere on the second floor, scavenging for interesting reading material from some half-empty bookshelves. The best stuff had apparently already been taken, leaving behind dry volumes on finance or family genealogy. She did manage to find one slim volume with a novella by PJ Stokeworth, a horror writer that the adults around her had always deemed her too young to preoccupy herself with.

She was making her way through the meandering set-up of the story, acquainting herself with the characters who lived on a drafty manor on a bog, when a witch appeared next to her.

Emily flinched, but stopped herself from hiding the book. It wasn't as if anyone had forbid her from reading anything, after all.

"There you are, child," the witch spoke, her voice dry and rough. "Delilah has requested your presence. Why don't you be a dear and head along to the gallery?"

"Alright," Emily said, suspicious, but eager for any opportunity to see Delilah.

She folded a corner of the page before she closed her book, but didn't dare place the volume back on the bookshelf, out of some worry it would be gone by the time she came back. She slipped it inside her jacket, instead, and started making her way to the gallery, in hops over the furniture,  and far reaches over chandeliers to keep her boots dry.

When she arrived at the gallery, Breanna wasn't at the door to stop her, for once, and she was already in the room before she got a look around.

"Delilah? I'm here, did you nee--" She choked on her words as she discovered that Delilah wasn't there, but somebody else most assuredly was.

She recognized the red Whaler's coat as she would any horror that had haunted her nightmares so often. When the Whaler turned around, however, it wasn't Daud's face, but a mask that stared back at Emily.

"Delilah, what's this?" the Whaler demanded, the voice husky and distorted by the mask, but undeniably feminine.

Emily felt the shift in the air behind her, the whisper of someone appearing in thin air, and then she felt Delilah's hands press down on her shoulders, pinning her in place as surely as nails through her feet. If Emily had not already been frozen in place, Delilah's merciless touch would have done the job just as well as any magic.

"A reminder, my dear," Delilah replied smoothly. 

The Whaler made no move towards them, but something in her posture suggested that she was bristling, furious.

"There is no turning back now, from any of it. Daud believes so because he is weak, fumbling. His new fixation with finding the girl proves as much, does it not?" Delilah said, and as she did, her thumb stroked lazily against Emily's shoulder. Emily took comfort in the gesture, though she did not understand any of this.

The Whaler remained quiet, though obviously still tense.

"And what will it happen if he does find her?" Delilah continued. "If he won't give her to the Lord Regent, then neither is Daud clever enough to place her on the throne as his pawn. Nothing has changed. The Whalers are still in need of new leadership, someone with more vision than that old fool. The real question is whether you will take your chance or let it slip you by."

"I get it," the Whaler grunted, sounding more like she just wanted Delilah to stop talking.

"Well, then," and Emily could hear the smirk in Delilah's voice, "why don't you take that mask off, then, my dear? Introduce yourself properly."

The Whaler hesitated for a few heartbeats, and Emily almost thought she would refuse, but the tension broke, and the Whaler reached up. Emily held her breath as Whaler pushed her hood back, and unclasped the mask. It came away to reveal first a sweep of black hair, and then dark brown skin as it was lowered further. There was a human underneath after all.

It had never occurred to Emily to think on the fact that there were real people under the masks, with real human faces. She would have sooner thought the Whaler suits were animate, or inhabited by otherworldly shades summoned by Daud to do his bidding. The reality was underwhelming and trite, and infinitely more horrifying than any flight of Emily's imagination. The woman, after removing her mask, did not meet Emily's eyes.

"There we go," Delilah said, and she leaned down, bringing her head over Emily's shoulder. "Emily Kaldwin, meet Billie Lurk. Daud's trusted second in command, and the person who will be putting a knife into his back." Then her eyes drifted over to the Whaler. "Isn't that right, dear Billie?"

The Whaler she gathered herself up, and this time she looked at Emily.

"That's right," Billie Lurk said, her jaw set.

 

* * *

 

For the better part of a year, in the aftermath of her mother's death, revenge had mostly passed through Emily's mind as a fleeting, hypothetical thing. She was not in any position to exact vengeance on any of the people who had wronged her, and to now be faced with the possibility of Daud being killed at the hand of someone he trusted seemed... hard to wrap her mind around.

She was dismissed by Delilah, in order for her to wrap up her conversation with Billie Lurk. Whatever rhetorical point Emily was meant to help make, Delilah had made it and no longer required her presence.

Emily lingered in the courtyard, perched up on the balcony above the front door. If Billie Lurk was going to leave, it would be through here, and Emily wanted to catch her on the way out. She kicked her feet, hanging over the stone banister, and watched a gravehound snuffling through the shallow water near the graveyard.

Emily did not like holding her Heart out near anyone else anymore. Nobody much seemed to notice the thing, but Granny had seen it once, and tutted, filled with pity for the object. It had made Emily feel defensive at the time. She took it out at night sometimes, however. Without her bonecharm to ward away nightmares, the Heart seemed to soothe them afterwards. When she was sleepless, she pressed a cheek to the Heart, bid it to whisper to her. ' _There was once love between these walls,_ ' it told her of Brigmore Manor, ' _until they realized it was only their wealth holding them together._ ' Every place with its own sad stories, it seemed.

Emily gave it another gentle squeeze, its gears spinning soundlessly. ' _A kiss on the doorstep--the day before it all went wrong_ ,' the Heart sighed.

She heard the door opening and closing before she saw Billie Lurk's red coat. Her mask was back in its place, hiding her face. Emily wondered what terrible secrets the Heart would tease out of Billie Lurk's soul. Terrible things, no doubt, considering she had willingly worked for Daud before working against him. 

Yet when she angled the Heart towards Billie, and the Heart lit up, what it said was this: ' _There was always hunger back then, on the streets of Dunwall. Hunger and fear. She learned to be brutal to survive._ '

It gave Emily pause, her own time on Dunwall's streets still too fresh. She'd avoided the urchins, those children of the streets who lived by wits and ruthlessness in a world that showed them no kindness. She'd never considered the kind of people those urchins eventually grew up into, the ones who survived at all. ...Whose fault was that, then? Would there be fewer killers in Dunwall, if some past monarch had taken an interest into providing those children with alternatives?

Emily gave the Heart another squeeze, dissatisfied with this line of thought. ' _It was years ago. The two were inseparable. There was no food, but there was love. Those brief days on the street with her childhood friend--the happiest times she's known_.'

Emily inhaled sharply. No, that was not what she wanted to know. 

Billie had started towards the gate, but she stopped in her tracks just then, her head turning to take in the courtyard. She turned around almost completely, spotting Emily, and stopping in place like a clockwork mechanism locking up. They looked at each other for what felt like a long time. Emily did not know how she was supposed to feel about Billie Lurk. There was still too much fear tied up in everything for her to see through clearly.

So when Billie disappeared and reappeared crouching on the stone banister next to her, Emily flinched.

"Sorry," Billie said, her body language tense and awkward. She balanced on her heels for a moment, before she seemed to come to some sort of a decision, and she sat down next to Emily, and took off her mask again. "Didn't mean to startle you," she continued when her whaler mask was off.

Emily shrugged, and looked away. She thought they'd be in for a very long, awkward silence until Billie eventually left, but the Whaler eventually spoke again.

"Delilah shouldn't have done that," Billie said tersely. "It wasn't fair to ambush you like that."

"It wasn't fair to kill my mother," Emily said, barely above a whisper. It was a vicious thing to say, and she was darkly gratified when she saw Billie's flinch from the corner of her eye. Had Billie been there? Her memories of the day were not always clear, but Billie would have been another anonymous Whaler, so it scarcely mattered.

"Fair didn't factor into it," Billie said, and Emily looked at her sharply before Billie continued, "but you're right, we shouldn't have done that. Daud should never have accepted that job, and he should have damn well known that before he went through with it and then spent the next eight months regretting it."

It was the first time Emily had ever had any notion that Daud regretted killing her mother. She'd never considered that a heartless assassin was capable of regret. It was yet another thing she didn't know how to feel about.

"So what are you going to do?" Emily asked.

"Kill Daud and take control of the Whalers," Billie said, as if it was as easy as all that. "Delilah is... helping. You're going to get your revenge, on Daud, if nobody else."

"Well, maybe I don't want revenge," Emily said bullishly. "Maybe I want my mother back."

"Maybe," Billie said, not unkindly, "but you have to settle for what's possible, not for what's ideal."

"I want Corvo back, then," Emily said.

"Corvo... Attano? The Royal Protector?"

Emily now felt foolish for revealing so much to somebody she barely trusted. She hadn't even managed to scrape up the courage to ask Delilah about breaking Corvo out of Coldridge, though the thought had been swimming through her head at night.

"They said he killed mother, and he didn't. He never ever would have hurt mother," Emily continued. "They sent him to prison, and it's not fair. He didn't do it, you know he didn't do it."

"No, of course he didn't," Billie agreed, bemused by the outburst. "You're right."

Emily hunched her shoulders, not expecting the agreement to come so easily. She felt her face heat up, angry at herself for her lapse, feeling too exposed. She looked down to her lap, where she had the Heart cradled in her hands, quiet and still.

She wondered if Billie would leave, but she sat there with Emily instead, in silence.

"What happened to your friend?" Emily asked after a while.

"...What?" Billie looked puzzled.

"Your childhood friend," Emily said. "The one you loved."

"How do you know about her?" Billie asked, her voice hushed, but dangerous.

"The Heart told me," Emily said.

Billie's brows drew together, confused and suspicious, so Emily took Billie's hand, and pressed it to the Heart she held in her hand. Billie's eyes finally caught on the Heart, noticing it for the first time, and her eyes widened.

"Oh," she said, a single exhalation of surprise.

"It was a gift," Emily explained, though really, it hardly explained anything. Billie seemed to accept that part, but she had a different question.

"Emily... whose heart is this?" Billie asked slowly.

"Mine, now," Emily said, as the Heart pulsed once, like something inside it flinched in recognition.


	5. Lullaby

After her first week at Brigmore, Emily's days seemed to melt together. She learned her way around the property well enough, its size negligible compared to the entirety of Dunwall. Having walked its length, Emily began turning her attention to getting into all of its nooks and crannies.

She ingratiated herself to Merilee, one of the witches who took up gardening, and in exchange for help crushing beetle wings for a spell, Emily was granted a bonecharm that would make the river krusts ignore her. 

"Why not get rid of the krusts?" Emily had asked, quite reasonably.

"They are useful, just as the gravehounds are useful," Merilee replied, in her slow meandering way, as she measured out a thimble of mercury. "Sometimes we harvest the acid they produce, and sometimes they serve to keep unwanted visitors away. It is best to leave them be, poor things."

'Poor things' was not how Emily would ever describe river krusts, but she let well enough alone. With her new bonecharm, she could walk right by them, and they would ignore her; not that Emily risked getting close anyway. She'd had to dodge a splash of acid one too many times over the past months for her comfort. 

"Could I get a piece of whalebone?" Emily asked Merilee one morning.

"Certainly it could be obtained, but whatever for?" Merilee asked, amused.

"I'd like to work on my bonecharms," Emily said. It was a skill she didn't want to let fall by the wayside, especially since she'd just gotten the hang of it.

Merilee's eyebrow rose, and she seemed willing to humor Emily, and she went to a cabinet and extracted a few pieces of whalebone.

"Will these do?"

Emily inspected the bits. It looked like someone had already tried to carve them, and given up not even a quarter of the way through. Sloppy, but she could still use most of the whalebone.

"Good enough," Emily said, "Thank you."

Merilee seemed to think it was some sort of child's game of pretend, and so nodded with an indulgent smile. She perhaps expected Emily to grow bored of the task soon enough.

So when Emily finished the bonecharm, she made sure to gift it to Merilee.

"Thank you for the whalebone," Emily said, as Merilee turned the bonecharm over in her hands, stunned by the workmanship. "Do you have any more?"

Merilee nodded mutely.

Over the next few days, word must have spread around Brigmore, because other witches approached her, offering little bits, making requests.

"I'm not very good yet, I won't always know what I get until it's done," Emily said.

"Quite alright, love," was the witches' usual response. Apparently they just wanted to see her do the trick, with no vested interest in the exact result.

Emily carved three in a day, then none for five days. She worked on one bonecharm for three days, then she went back and forth working on two others over the next week.

The results varied: a bonecharm for a clearer voice, for a sharper eye in the dark, for grace in motion, for a quiet step. She finished two that worked as twins, alerting its user if anything happened to the person who wore its pair.

The witches were intrigued by all of the results. Even Delilah took an interest. Emily could not even have dreamed Delilah would take an interest in anything she did.

Delilah was usually busy, deep in her art or her spellwork or her plotting in Dunwall. She did emerge from her studio or her gallery on a regular basis, to grace her witches with her presence. They all fawned over her, eager to get her attention however they could: reports of her enemies, new feats of magic, gifts. All of them, caught in Delilah's orbit, straining to get ever closer to her.

Even when Delilah was not around, however, Emily still had the witches' stories of her: of how Delilah saved them from lives of misery and thankless labor, of their travels and adventure, how Delilah always got them out of any bind by wit or by magic, how she played the rich fools of the world like fiddles. 

Delilah had grown in Dunwall Tower, had escaped poverty and become Sokolov's student, had gotten the Outsider's attention. Delilah had plans, and ambition, and the drive to become something greater. And though they were always cagey about revealing any of Delilah's plans to Emily, it was not as if Emily needed to know what they were in order to admire Delilah. 

 

* * *

 

Emily came across Delilah in the manor's back yard one morning. She was sitting primly on the edge of the decorative fountain, and at least half a dozen witches were clumped around her. Breanna, as always, was at her left, sitting next to her. Evelyn and Tilda were there as well, sitting on the ground at Delilah's feet. Two more witches were sitting near Breanna, and one was standing.

Emily drew closer spurred by the same curiosity that had her all over Brigmore, but it was Delilah's gaze falling on her that invited Emily closer.

"Ah, come here," Delilah gestured imperiously, and Emily obeyed; when Delilah spoke, they all obeyed. "I've been hearing you have clever hands."

Emily didn't understand at first, and glanced at the other witches to gauge if she was in trouble.

"Let me see you work," Delilah said.

So Emily ran to her room, and then ran back almost breathlessly, to show Delilah her two bonecharms of a pair. Delilah inspected them thoroughly, turning them this way and that, and finally nodded once in approval.

"You have a talent for the work," she said, and handed one bonecharm to Breanna, slipping the other into her jacket.

"I have one of hers as well," one of the witches interjected. "It serves well enough."

"Where did you learn this skill?" Delilah asked.

"Granny Rags," Emily said.

"Ah," something shifted in Delilah's face, and she leaned forward to take Emily's left hand. Her long finger brushed over the Outsider's Mark, and it glowed blue, tingling. "A cunning old thing, that one. She had to be, to have survived so long. But you'll find that in more ways than one, I am more than her equal."

Delilah raised her left hand, and with a flick of her wrist, a layer of light seemed to strip away from the back of her hand, revealing a Mark to match the one Emily had. 

Emily goggled at the Mark, going as far as taking Delilah's hand. When she poked at the Mark, it glowed, just as her own had glowed in sympathy at Delilah's touch.

"You met the Outsider too?" Emily asked, her amazement with Delilah ratcheting higher by a few rungs. She'd heard the other witches say so, but she hadn't seem Delilah's Mark until now.

"I have," Delilah agreed, "though I see that, like all men, he is forever on the hunt for younger flesh." She took Emily's chin in her hand, her expression grave. "This is your lesson, Emily Kaldwin. Take from them whatever they give you, but know that they will all fail you eventually, and you will have only yourself to rely on in the end."

Emily nodded, trying to match Delilah's gravity; it felt like something important that Delilah was imparting to her.

"Good," Delilah said, satisfied that Emily took her words to heart. "Sit with us." She indicated to the ground, and Emily dropped down to the ground by Delilah's knees.

She relished the opportunity to bask in Delilah's presence, to hear her tell of some new thing she had discovered in forbidden teachings the Abbey had confiscated, and that she had recovered by charming some hapless overseer.

 

* * *

 

The next few weeks passed as Emily had come to expect of life at Brigmore, except that Emily had become familiar enough with the place that boredom began insinuating itself at the edges of her life. She had, on occasion, grown tired of her routine on Dunwall's streets, but her life had always had an edge of peril that kept her from growing too restive. Here, at Brigmore, feeling as safe as she ever had that year, she had time enough to think on other things, and grow impatient.

She began listening to the trickle of news, to eavesdrop on the witches who came back from Dunwall to give reports, or change assignments. She learned that the Lord Regent was growing increasingly paranoid and suspicious of his closest allies, and that the Parliament was considering a vote of no confidence as the months passed and he failed to produce Emily. In the wake of the Lord Regent's declining popularity, Overseer Campbell was ascendant, many of Burrows' former allies falling in line behind Campbell instead. The situation between the two men was tense, to say the least.

Between the City Watch and the Overseers, the city was subject to constant patrols, harassing the populace, both the sick, and the poor souls even suspected of sickness. Sokolov had failed to produce a plague cure yet, but his devices were deployed with increased frequency. This proved a mistake, as many of the devices in the less secure districts fell into the hands of Dunwall's gangs engaged in territorial disputes.

Billie came to report as frequently as she could, which was maybe a handful of times over the months. She brought news too, things that didn't necessarily interest Delilah but that Emily appreciated being told. The plague was still ongoing, and the corpse carts were running constantly now. She learned that the Lord Regent ordered entire neighborhoods burned to the ground around the quarantined zones where most of the city's rich and aristocratic set lived. Journalists had been arrested for writing about it, even though everyone could see the smoke over Dunwall for days, and there was no hiding it. Few people died in the flames only because so many were dead already.

There were workers' strikes being broken in the slaughterhouses, whale oil rationing enforced on an already burdened populace. Discontent and despair growing deeper by the day.

Emily was always filled with guilt and anxiety after Billie told her about these things, but she never asked Billie to stop either. It felt, somehow, worse to not know these things at all. 

 

* * *

 

Emily was in the gallery with Delilah when one of the witches came to report a barrister named Timsch had been arrested and disgraced, and Daud was likely to blame for it. Delilah's mouth had tightened, and she'd dismissed the witch with a wave of the hand. 

"Who's Timsch?" Emily had asked.

"Nobody of any importance, anymore," Delilah said. "Now, why don't you show me that diagram Granny taught you?"

Emily nodded and drew it on the blackboard as accurately as she could remember. She truly did wish she still had her notebook, but Delilah seemed pleased nonetheless. Seemed to understand more about the symbol than Emily. Delilah's long fingers brushed through Emily's hair fondly.

This had become part of Emily's routine as well, always the highlight of any day. Delilah would share some of her secrets with her favorites, and Emily had become part of that select group at some point. In exchange, Emily gave Delilah whatever she wished: any secret she had gleaned from Granny, any tidbit she could remember from her life at Dunwall Tower, and secrets she had uncovered in Dunwall.

It pleased Delilah, to have Emily be this forthcoming towards her.

"I can only hope," Delilah remarked airily one day, "that you'll remember me once you're on your throne."

Emily's eyes widened at these words, and she experienced a sudden anxiousness that she had not known was in her: not that she would forget Delilah, but that Delilah would forget her.

"But," Emily said, clinging to Delilah's hand, "you'll be with me, won't you?"

Delilah's eyes narrowed, even as a smile spread across her lips.

"Will I, dear?" Delilah asked, shrugging almost carelessly. "I'm just some poor witch. What use would you have for me?"

Emily's mind reeled, because what kind of question was that? How was it not self-evident that she would need Delilah's support? Who would Emily even have to trust once she was crowned, when her own mother's court had been a pit of backstabbers?

"No, you're more than that," Emily insisted. "You-- You're smarter and braver and scarier than anyone I know!"

"Is that so?"

"Well... scary in a good way! I mean..."

"I understand your meaning," Delilah said. "And of course it would do me no greater pleasure than to... serve the throne in any capacity I can. So tell me, sweet girl, is that what you wish? That after we cut off the head of that snake Hiram Burrows, I should become your new Lady Regent?"

Emily hadn't been thinking of it in such concrete titles, but once Delilah said the words, it seemed like a natural fit. What other role would suit Delilah better? She already ruled her witches like an empress. How would Lady Regent be any different?

So Emily nodded, and something flashed in Delilah's eyes. Her expression turned pleased, and she brushed her knuckles down Emily's cheeks.

"So be it, then," Delilah said. "When the day comes, remember this conversation, because I will hold you to it."

Emily nodded again, happy at Delilah's easy acceptance.

 

* * *

 

As Emily's thoughts turned towards Dunwall again, her nightmares returned to their usual repertoire. She had the one about her mother again, where the Empress was still in the gazebo, slowly bleeding out but still alive, because nobody had thought to go back and make sure she was dead.

She had almost come to expect them, so it was a surprise, then, when Emily put her head down on her pillow one night, and instead of the usual nightmares, she woke up on a floating chunk of pavement over the bottomless Void. Emily looked around, confused about her presence there, but certain this was the Void. Had the Outsider brought her here? He'd been quiet since she arrived at Brigmore. There were runes, sometimes, but no shrines to him here; Delilah allowed none to be built.

"Hello?" she called out, but there was nothing, not even an echo. She had the curious feeling that she should be keeping quiet, instead.

She used her far reach to get to another piece of floating ground, and this one was soft grass and glowing flowers, beautiful like a piece of Brigmore. She thought nothing of following ancient stone stairs, wending grassy paths, and an arching doorway through the trunk of a tree until she reached the curious platform at the end, marked by a semi-circle of colonnades.

There was something like an altar down there, a stone slab that even Emily could see had been meant for some ritual. She followed the stairs down to the altar, but there was nothing on it except long-extinguished candles.

She turned back towards the way she came, feeling vaguely uneasy, something like a trespasser. There was a statue of Delilah, but there was also, hanging from the branches of an orange-leafed tree, a large painting. The frame was intact, but the painting itself had been slashed, two cuts meeting in an X, and the resulting flaps hung loosely apart.

Emily approached, though each step she took closer filled her with dread. The colors of the canvas had the familiar quality of Delilah's paintings, somewhere between the iridescence of an oil slick and the mottled chaos of a used palette, coming together unexpectedly to reveal they had always followed outlines of people or things. Emily had never met anyone who painted quite like Delilah; she had been Sokolov's student, but she had clearly developed her own voice beyond that.

 

The painting was large and tall, hanging high up. Emily rose to the tips of her toes as she slid her hands along the edges of the two flaps of canvas on either side, and flattened them as best she could. They swung heavily into place, with a dull slap, and Emily glimpsed, just for a moment, the image on them.

Was this a portrait of--?

But she barely had time to think the question, before she felt cold claws against her ankles, and she was pulled off her feet and dragged across the ground. She shrieked and tried to grab onto something anything, but she was dragged over the edge, and fell into nothing.

She plunged into her nightmares again.

 

* * *

 

Emily woke up the next morning weighed down by fatigue, her eyes stinging. She never felt quite right after a night of restless dreams, but this felt worse somehow.

Regardless, she got up, washed with water from the basin, got dressed. She went hunting for breakfast as she did every morning, managing to snag some sausage and an apple from the makeshift pantry, before Caroline, the witch in charge of supplies, shooed her out with a cuff upside the head.

Emily perched on some broken masonry near the graveyard to eat, and she got halfway through the sausage before she realized she did not have much of an appetite. She pocketed the apple for later, but she hopped down and fed the remains of the sausage to a gravehound.

The entire process was messy and fascinating. The gravehounds had no lips anymore, or need to eat for that matter, but they seemed to retain some knowledge of what eating entailed. It chewed on the sausage for a long time, grinding it between its teeth, but it did not swallow, merely mashing the bit of sausage into a pulp until it dribbled through its fangs.

"That's gross," Emily imparted to the gravehound as she scratched its scruff.

The gravehound stared at her with its empty eye pits, and did not react much otherwise.

Emily was so preoccupied with the gravehound, that she scarcely noticed the witch emerging from the graveyard, holding a lever. The witch was apparently just as distracted, because she flinched when she saw Emily.

"Hi, Agnes," Emily greeted warily.

"Oh, Emily, it's you," the witch said. "Please be careful, we're setting up tripwires around here soon. And I removed the lever for the crypt entrance, so make sure you don't leave the door open from the inside."

"Why?" Emily asked.

"It's Daud," Agnes said, and at Emily's instant look of alarm, waved her hand soothingly. "Don't worry, dear, it's just a bit of precaution. In case he comes here, he will be in for some nasty surprises."

"Is he likely to come?" Emily asked.

"Don't worry, dear," Agnes assured again, thought it didn't make Emily feel at all reassured. "Perhaps you can help. Evie and Saloma are setting up the tripwires inside. See if they need anything."

Emily did as she was told, though she found herself apprehensive about it. She was going to have to keep an eye out for tripwires now, apparently. She didn't know how she felt about this. The river krusts had been bad enough in those first few days at Brigmore, she wasn't looking forward to having to dodge yet more perils in a place where she was just becoming comfortable.

But Daud... if he was truly coming, then a few traps hardly seemed like they would keep him out.

Emily went inside, as Agnes told her to, but instead of finding Evelyn or Saloma, her steps took her to the art gallery. Breanna was once again at the door, her arms crossed forbiddingly, but she was looking inside instead of out, and Emily paused outside the door unseen to eavesdrop.

Billie Lurk was back, probably reporting Daud's latest moves. The name of Timsch came up again, and Emily guessed it had to be important, but she could only just hear what they were saying, picking out words and snatches of conversation. She waited outside the door--not for very long, all things considered--until Billie was finished, and strode out.

The Whaler trailed to a stop, her mask concealing her expression, but her head tilted in a question.

"Emily? Are you well?" Billie said.

"Is Daud really coming here?" Emily asked breathlessly.

Billie paused, her head swinging towards the open doorway to the art gallery. She turned the goggled eyes of her mark back towards Emily.

"You shouldn't worry," Billie said. "He's not going to do anything to you."

Emily could have guessed that. She was valuable, of course he'd want her alive.

"But he'll come for Delilah?" she asked.

"He'll _try_ ," Billie said.

Emily stood frozen, and strangely numb inside. If she had any bravery, she would have walked into the gallery right then, and offered to be turned over to Daud before he killed Delilah the way he had killed the Empress. But Emily could not. Emily did not know what would happen to her once Daud got his claws into her, she didn't know who he would give her to, and Delilah seemed to loom so large, that it was unimaginable he would be able to cut her down. 

"But, you'll stop him, right?" Emily asked instead, worry and hope twisting together tightly in her chest as she grasped at this small hope.

"It's... not so easy as that," Billie said. "He hasn't lived this long by being easy to kill. And he's almost always surrounded by other Whalers. If I do this, it has to be in a way makes it clear to the others that I'm in charge once Daud is dead. They have to see that he was weak, and that I'm strong."

"That's why you need Delilah's help," Emily surmised, trying not to let her disappointment show.

Billie shifted her weight, reached a hand out slowly. She placed it on Emily's shoulder carefully, as if afraid Emily would bite it off if she moved to abruptly.

"I'm close, Emily," she said. "Don't worry. This will all be over soon, one way or another."

Emily nodded, but it didn't feel that way to her at all. Still, she tried to shake it off, and put the matter aside. There were people looking out for her now. There were grown-ups whose job was to worry about Daud.

"Are you going now?" Emily asked.

"I probably should be," Billie said. "The whole trip takes a few hours here and back."

"Have you met the gravehounds?" Emily asked.

"I had to, so they wouldn't try to tear my throat out," Billie said. Then, tilting her head in suspicion, "...Why?"

Emily rolled on her heels, a bit sheepish.

"I was going to go play fetch with them," Emily imparted like a terrible secret. "I was wondering if you'd like to come along."

Billie chuckled, the sound coming strange from the confines of her mask.

"I suppose I can stay for a few more minutes," Billie said.

Emily grinned, always happy to find some new person who'd indulge her. 

 

* * *

 

Billie left soon after, not even the lure of playing fetch with undead hounds enough to keep her there for long, and Emily's attempts at seeing Delilah were foiled by Breanna, who seemed more stony than usual. So Emily went wandering around the property afterwards, half-heartedly exploring places she had already learned inch by inch, and then going back to her room, where she tried working on a bonecharm. She got through a few half-hearted scratches on bone before she put it aside again. The task felt too draining for once.

She left her room again towards evening, scavenging for food again. She managed to snatch some dry crackers left out in the open, and some pears. She didn't much feel hungry, but she ate them all anyway. 

Night meant several restless hours of tossing and turning until she finally fell asleep, dragged under by strange nightmares. 

Over the next few night, the nightmares felt different than her usual ones. If there were people in them, they were faceless, anonymous. More often, the dreams involved running through maze-like corridors, or trying to hide from slavering monsters that always seemed to find her. She rarely saw what hunted her, and almost never recognized the non-descript corridors as places she'd been. They were oddly impersonal compared to her nightmares up to that point, stripped of any detail, but when she woke from them, she felt more drained than usual, as if she had spent the entire night not just terrified in her bed, but physically running.

Emily felt listless by the third day waking up like this, her thoughts blurry and her body a heavy weight she dragged along without any enthusiasm.

A strange thought crossed her mind, that this was some punishment for trespassing in that place in the Void. Was this the Outsider's doing, though? She didn't think it was; surely the more obvious way to exact punishment would be to take away his Mark from her, yet it was always there on Emily's skin, each morning she woke up.

Emily was pondering that exact thing as she passed through the solarium, and reached to the corridor on the second floor. She was going to the art gallery, to find Delilah, hopeful that Breanna wouldn't be guarding this entrance, but she forgot one vital detail as she headed through the corridor.

Emily recalled the tripwire in the split second she felt it against her shin, the click-whir of the trap being activated. The first shot blasted, and, suddenly more awake than she had been in days, Emily jumped just as the spot she was standing on burst into flames.

She slammed hard to the floor, unsinged but jarred by the impact. On reflex, her hand shot to her breast pocket. That morning, she had equipped all her bonecharms automatically, her body going through the motions as her mind muddled along, but that may well have saved her life. One of the bonecharms she slipped into her jacket was the one that prevented the first shot of any weapon from hitting her. The explosive bolt from the nearby launcher had struck the floor instead, bursting into a single lick of flame before guttering out against the damp wood of Brigmore Manor.

Lucky as Emily had been, the sound attracted every single nearby witch, who came running to investigate. Tilda and Evelyn were there first, their blades drawn, expressions pinched in worry and confusion when they saw Emily on the floor.

"Sorry," Emily said, clambering to her feet. "Sorry, I forgot, sorry," she mumbled, as neither Tilda nor Evelyn made any move to help. They'd been guarding the art gallery, and if they heard, then--

Emily winced as Delilah appeared behind them, frowning.

"I forgot about the tripwires," Emily admitted, head hanging down to hide her reddening cheeks.

She felt Delilah's fingers around her chin, tilting up her head, and Emily looked up at the woman. Delilah's eyes were searching, tracing over Emily's face.

"Poor child," Delilah crooned, "you look tired."

Emily nodded slowly; she was tired, more exhausted than she'd ever felt in her life.

"Tilda, take Emily to her room," Delilah ordered. "Make sure she rests."

"But--" Emily began protesting.

"I will be along later," Delilah said, cutting her off with a glance. "And I'll have something for you."

 

* * *

 

Emily returned to her room as instructed, but despite how tired she felt, neither did she feel like resting. She laid down on the mattress anyway, but she found herself unable to sleep. Her eyes trailed across the room; it was not as barren as it had been when she first moved into it. There was a small stack of books by the end table, a broken suitcase where Emily kept a few articles of clothing that had come her way, and a tray with a bunch of Cullero grapes and a tin of whalemeat that she'd taken for herself from the pantry. 

There were chalk drawings along the beams and floor of the room now, too. She'd drawn crows, gravehounds, rats; she'd practiced flowers, though she could never get roses right.

She considered getting up, finding her piece of chalk and trying her hand at roses again, but now that she thought about it, neither did she have the energy to get up. She sat there, bored, until she heard the clack of heels outside her room.

Emily did sit up from her mattress when Delilah appeared through the broken floor and stepped into Emily's room. 

"This is where you sleep?" Delilah asked, casting her gaze around the room. She crouched next to the pile of books, inspecting the titles, then rounded to the chalk drawings.

Delilah had never seen Emily's room, naturally. Emily had never seen Delilah's studio either, had never been allowed to bother her there, nor had she ever dared poking around in there when Delilah wasn't around. The art gallery was one thing, but the studio was Delilah's personal space.

"I think it's cozy," Emily said, a bit defensive.

"Of course," Delilah smiled briefly. "We all make do."

She approached Emily, and crouched down next to her mattress, producing an object--a candle.

"This is to help you rest," Delilah said, and lit the candle with a gesture. She dribbled some wax onto the floor directly, before carefully planting the candle upright into the resulting glob of wax.

It smelled strange, aromatic. Unlike anything Emily had smelled, though she couldn't tell if that was good or bad.

"Lie down," Delilah instructed, and Emily did so.

When Emily wouldn't close her eyes, Delilah placed her palm over her eyes. Her hand was rough and warm, and smelled like paint and flowers.

"Now, tell me Emily, did your mother ever sing you lullabies?" Delilah asked.

Emily thought back, but she couldn't think of her mother ever singing her lullabies. Emily had always preferred stories before bed, and if mother ever saw her to sleep her, it was by reading her a story, though more often it was Corvo this task fell to. Now that Emily thought about it, she wasn't entirely sure her mother had ever known lullabies.

"No," she said after a long pause, her mouth feeling dry.

"Well," Delilah said, "another of Jessamine's shortcoming."

Before Emily could react to the comment, Delilah started singing.

_After sparrows, three times called, after gull does three times fall..._

And Emily let herself be lulled.

 

* * *

 

Emily didn't know if she was fully awake, but she was not fully asleep, she didn't think. If she'd been asleep there would have been nightmares, to be sure. Instead there was-- a curl of smoke rising from a candle, a smell like incense, the chalk drawings on the wall wavering, moving... dancing?

Delilah had been here, just now. Or--yesterday? Last night?

Emily raised a hand to look at it, but couldn't see it before her eyes. She panicked for a moment, before she realized it was dark. Already? Hadn't she been watching the chalk drawings? No, that was earlier. It was dark now. The trees outside her window cast shadows, like long fingers tapping on the glass.

She woke--or had been awake?--when it was morning again. The candle had guttered out at some point, leaving only its heady scent behind, and Emily rose, woozy and dry-mouthed. 

She brushed her hair and dressed slowly, and she was still uncertain in her senses when she left her room. Food, water. She washed her face with water from the pool in the greenhouse, and the coolness woke her a bit more. She didn't feel tired, exactly, but she felt faraway from her body, uncertain if she was physically present in the world. It was odd, but she also felt too detached to worry too much about it.

"Sweet girl, where have you wandered off?" one of the witches asked. "It's dangerous to be out and about."

Emily looked at the witch, dredged her name up from murky depths. Heloise. There was something she was supposed to remember about Heloise, but Emily let the thought fall by the wayside, too disinterested in pursuing the question.

"Back to your room, dear," Heloise ushered her along, and Emily went, thinking of no reason she shouldn't.

When she arrived to the room, Heloise lit the candle again, and Emily slept, probably. She couldn't be sure.

 

* * *

 

It was the same day or the next when Emily woke again. The candle was out again, perhaps because of how drafty and damp the manor was. Emily rose again, as she did every morning, to dress and wash and eat and tend to the minutia of a living body. 

She wandered the manor in a daze after that, uncertain what she was meant to be doing. There were more locked doors than she remembered, and she must have circled back and forth a dozen times, trying the same door handle over and over, before another witch walked her back to her room, and relit her candle.

The third time, the candle had not gone out. Emily knew because she was watching the wavering of the flame, blue-white at the center, like a keyhole into a different world. But a sharp huff blew it out, and Emily blinked at the sight of the witch who'd done it. She hadn't heard anyone walk in.

"You can't sit in bed all day, love," the witch said, her voice sad and rough. Merilee, Emily's sluggish mind provided. Emily liked her, but why was she always so sad? "Come now, get up. We must get some food in you."

Emily did as she was told, let herself be dressed and primped, then taken downstairs. She felt like she'd returned to herself once she had some food and stretched her legs. 

She was sitting in the courtyard, perched on a broken piece of masonry, watching the gravehounds, and she thought about how strange it was that she hadn't done this in a while. What had kept her in the room...? But even as she wondered, she couldn't think on the question for long enough to answer. Her thoughts slipped and disappeared like water through her fingers.

"Emily?"

She turned towards the sound of her name, amazed to hear it. To the witches, she was always 'dear' or 'love' or 'child'. She never realized how much she missed 'Emily'.

She was taken aback, however, when she came face to face with a mask. She knew there was something that should have alarmed her about that mask, but for the moment, she couldn't remember what.

"Are you alright?" someone asked from deep inside the mask.

Emily continued staring, trying to puzzle together what she was trying to remember. Slowly, the mask came undone, and a face appeared.

"Oh," Emily said, reaching out to touch her cheek. "Billie."

Billie caught Emily's hand, frowning as she looked Emily over.

"Emily, how do you feel?" Billie asked slowly.

"I'm fine, how are you?" Emily replied, almost reflexively. She couldn't think of any reason she didn't feel fine. "Do you want to play with the gravehounds again?"

"No, I--" Billie's eyes darted to the door, to the suspicious glances of the nearest witch. "Emily," she said, her voice dropping low, "is something wrong?"

Emily blinked, confused by the question. She frowned, wondering what Billie meant.

The witch patrolling nearby took a sharp turn, and a few pointed steps towards them. Billie pulled her mask back over her face and turned away towards the manor, before the witch got close enough.

Emily was left behind, a thought turning slowly in her head. She touched on it gently, from afar, afraid it would disappear if she looked at it too closely.

 

* * *

 

There were locked doors in Brigmore Manor now, but there were also passages that the witches had not even considered to block, the splintered holes in walls, or the gaping holes in doorway barricades that were too narrow for a human. The vents.

It had been too long, but Emily turned into a shadow, and this form was more suited than anything for the heavy curtain that forced Emily's mind into an eternal present. Instead of confused, her thoughts rang clear as a bell, and it was little work to scrabble up through the cracks of the manor until she was in the attic.

A handful of witches had made the attic room their quarters. Mattresses and pillows were piled along the floor, and chests were shoved against the walls.

There was a rune here; Emily knew because the Heart had shown her, but she had always avoided taking it because it was obvious it belonged to one of the witches.

She had no such compunction now. She found the key under a pillow, where Sabrine had left it. The others always teased Sabrine about being a silly goose, forgetful and careless with her things. Emily had felt bad for her at one point. Now she turned the key in the lock, shoved open the lid of the chest, and found the rune.

It melted away in her hands, but its song remained behind, to thrum in her veins. It had been too long since Emily had done this, as well, and the power shot through her veins like acid, melting away something that Emily had not even noticed was there. Smoke in her blood, or smoke in her mind; both.

Emily felt an uncommon calm settle over her instead, like clarity, or the prelude to a terrible anger. 

 

* * *

 

Emily didn't know if she was being paranoid, but once she noticed the strange stupor, it was easier to stay focused.

She climbed down from the attic, wanting to find Delilah, but she was waylaid on her way to the art gallery. The witches spoke sickly-sweet to her, and insisted she needed to rest.

Emily considered the tantrum she wanted to throw, and what it might get her, and in the end chose caution. They did not need to know yet.

"You're right, I _am_ feeling tired," Emily said, trying to sound guileless, and the witches accepted it without suspicion.

She was taken to her room, and the candle lit again. Emily sprawled on the mattress, but held her breath until the witch was out of the room, and then when she released it, it was in a sharp hiss that blew out the candle. The heady incense smell lingered for a moment still, and went straight to Emily's head when she breathed in again, but this time it didn't linger. 

She washed her face with water from the basin, the coolness waking her up more, and then she turned to a different question.

Why would Delilah do this to her?

It was not the politically-minded heiress wondering this; not the princess who witnessed her mother's betrayal; not even the urchin who learned Dunwall by rooftops. It was only Emily, a hurt child who thought she'd found someone to trust, and now discovered that the regard she gave to someone was not returned in kind.

Hadn't Delilah liked her? Emily thought back on the past weeks, of sitting at Delilah's feet in rapt attention, of quiet evenings in the art gallery, Delilah's fingers brushing through her hair. Of the promise to make her Lady Regent. Had that been all Delilah had been seeking? Perhaps Delilah hadn't meant for this to happen. She'd been the one to bring the candle to Emily's room, but after the first time, it had always been the other witches who lit it. But then... where was Delilah while Emily navigated eddies of delirium? How many days had it been?

Emily found herself at a loss, unsure what to believe. But she wasn't helpless. If there were answers to be had, she had to have them. 

She left her room quietly, and ghosted through the cracks and shadows of the manor, unseen. The witches did not spot her; they went about their day with little thought or concern for Emily. They likely would have stopped her if they knew what the girl had in mind, but as things stood, they did not know she was making her way through Brigmore towards the last place Emily would have ever been permitted.

Delilah was not in her studio. Tripwires had been set up there as well, and Emily stepped over them carefully, as she walked in. She had never been here, had never been allowed, and she didn't know what she expected. Something more impressive, or more frightening. A larger room, or a more amazing one.

There was a bookshelf on the far wall, and a wall of sketches over a table. Emily approached carefully, and froze in front of them.

They were sketches of her.

Emily's fingers worried at the ends of her hair, now hanging down her shoulders, much longer than in the sketches. These were not drawing of Emily as she was now, but as she was--before. Her old white satin suit, the ribbon in her hair, the short bob she'd had, which had now grown out, the blank back of her hand.

This reminded her of the picture from the Void, the night when the nightmares started. She'd forgotten about it, but it hadn't been just a dream. She'd been there in the Void, and the picture as well. She'd been surprised at the time, because it looked like a picture of herself.

Emily turned to the table, turning over papers. There were notes there, some that Delilah had written, some that others had written to her.

Her fingers shook as she flipped through the papers, her heart in her throat. She read carefully, incredulously, about the unraveling of Delilah's plans and the slowly cobbled pieces of a new one.

Emily felt as thought someone had picked up her world and tilted it, and everything shifted around her like the shards inside a kaleidoscope, yet here Emily still was, having to live in this new world.

She thought she had an ally. Now Emily discovered she'd had an enemy before even meeting her.

 

* * *

 

Emily crept back towards her room, squeezing once against through cracks and vents. She tired at some point, however, and curled on top of a bookshelf to rest as she waited for one of the witches' patrols to amble out of sight. When they were sufficiently far away, she dropped down to the rotten carpet as quietly as possible.

She rounded a corner, about to duck down a side corridor before the next patrol came through, when she felt a hand on her forearm, warm and leathery. She squealed in surprise, and felt herself get tugged into a blind corner.

"Shh!"

Emily turned, saw the gloved hand first--hovering near her face, as if wanting to clasp over her mouth but afraid to touch her--and she looked up into the Whaler's mask, and the red coat.

"Billie," Emily breathed out, relief making her knees sag. "I thought you left."

"I wanted to see you before I went," Billie said. "Something's wrong, isn't it?"

"I--" Emily felt tears prickle at her eyes traitorously, and a knot in her throat stopped her from speaking. It was one thing to have terrible revelations, it seemed entirely a different thing to speak them out loud. She didn't know if she could. "I want to leave," Emily said. "Take me with you."

Billie seemed momentarily stunned.

"Daud is still looking for you," Billie said gently.

"I don't-- I don't care, I just want to leave this place. I want..." She wanted Corvo, truth be told. She sniffed miserably, caught by surprise by how much her chest burned at the thought of him. If he was here, he'd fix it. He'd fix everything. And even if not, at least he'd be there. "I want to go."

"Alright," Billie said. "Alright. I'll see what I can do."

"You won't take me with you?" Emily asked, almost panicked. She thought Billie would take her now, if she agreed.

"I can't," Billie said. "The skiff that takes me here and back to Dunwall is arranged by Delilah. The boatsman will only take me. I need to... find some other way to sneak you past quarantine. And things in Dunwall are progressing, as well."

Emily grabbed Billie's sleeve just then.

"She was going to take my body," Emily said, voice so quiet she thought Billie didn't hear her at first.

"What do you mean?" Billie asked, just as quietly.

"She had a painting, for a ritual. Delilah was going to live in my body, and... replace me. So everyone would think she was me."

Billie inhaled sharply.

"But when I got this," Emily swallowed, and brought up her hand with the Mark, "the notes said my connection to the Void was too strong, and the ritual might not work. That it might... turn out bad for her if she tried. So she... she had to change her plans. And that's why she was nice to me. That's why she saved me from Daud. She wants me to make her Lady Regent."

They stood for a few long moments in frozen silence, Emily's words hanging heavily in the air around them. Emily would have liked to say more, to ask Billie if she knew. But Billie seemed to be grappling with something at the moment, and Emily could just see the strange twitches and shivers under her heavy whaler costume, like the manifestation of some inner conflict. She waited to see what reaction Billie would settle on.

"Emily, listen," Billie started, leaning closer and talking quickly, "about Daud. Whatever Delilah told you, what he's planning for you isn't--"

"Billie, dear, are you still here?" a voice cut through whatever Billie had been intending to say.

Emily startled to the tips of her hair, and even Billie stiffened, and straightened abruptly.

It was Breanna. She had managed to sneak up on them, unseen and unheard, and Emily had a terrifying moment of wondering just how much Breanna had managed to eavesdrop.

"I was just leaving," Billie said coolly.

"See that you do," Breanna replied, her voice even frostier.

Billie stood in place for a moment, unwilling to move, but she turned her head towards Emily a final time, and then stepped away, turning to walk off. She rounded a corner, and Emily's heart sank as she disappeared from sight.

Breanna's hand was firm as it fell to Emily's shoulder.

"Why don't we get you to your room?" Breanna crooned softly. It sounded full of malice, but that was how Breanna sounded much of the time anyway, so Emily did not know what to make of it yet. She nodded obediently, and let Breanna usher her along.

Breanna probably did not hear anything of what Emily had been talking about, because she thought nothing of flagging down one of the other witches and passing instructions to her over Emily's head.

"When the boatsman returns for payment," Breanna said, "slit his throat and roll him into the river."

"But then, how will Billie get to Brigmore?" the other witch asked.

"Billie Lurk is no longer required," Breanna said. "If she returns, feel free to slit her throat as well."

Emily felt a chill creep down her spine, and kept her eyes to the floor to hide the burgeoning sense of horror rising inside her.

"Come along, girl," Breanna said, and Emily went, if only out of fear of what might happen if she did not.


	6. Musical Chairs

In the days following Billie's departure, Emily found herself perpetually returning to their last conversation.

'Whatever Delilah told you,' Billie had said. 'Daud's plan for you isn't--' Or had it been, 'What Daud has planned for you isn't--'

Emily tried to recall the exact words, but more important was the sudden stop of them. What Daud planned for her wasn't... what? What was Billie going to say about Daud?

That he didn't have anything bad planned? 'Whatever Delilah told you'. But Delilah had not said anything of what Daud planned. She and Emily both had taken it as a given that Daud should not get his hands on Emily, and the precise reason hadn't warranted any discussion.

But if Delilah's intentions had been bad from the start, and if Daud's were in contrast, then...

No, as much as Emily tried, as much as she'd accepted that Delilah meant her ill, she still could not conceive the strange reverse universe where Delilah was her enemy and Daud, somehow, her ally. Easier to assume that he was another danger she would have to avoid. And anyway, if Daud's intentions weren't bad, would Billie want to kill him? Emily had started to like Billie. Maybe even trust her. Accepting that Billie was a nice enough person came at odds with any notion that Daud was one as well. Good people didn't betray each other, did they?

Emily turned the notion over and over in her head as she worked to carve a new bonecharm, and she had reached no definite conclusion even as she finished it. But she did have a bonecharm in the end: for dullness of senses and clarity of thought. It would make it harder for her to smell the candle, and easier to keep a clear head, even though it came at the expense of all her senses. She kept the bonecharm under her pillow as she slept, for all the times the witches would sneak into her room at night and light the candle.

During the day, Emily made sure to give no sign that the candle did not work. She was pliable and soft-spoken, and always did precisely as the witches asked of her. The only reason it did not grate on Emily as much as it would have, was because she thought of this as part of her revenge.

She'd learned much about the witches in her time at Brigmore: their habits, their friendships, their petty rivalries, and their constant vying for Delilah's favor. 

It was little enough work, Emily had discovered, to sow discord among them. She could take an object, something as inconsequential as a hairbrush, and move it into another witch's things, and suddenly two women were at each other's throat over some perceived theft. She could carefully rip out pages from journals, and suddenly a spike of paranoia would turn another witch into a snappish, insufferable creature that her sisters would like to see drowned.

Emily made sure never to get caught at it, to maintain the illusion that she was always in plain sight, being a harmless, addle-brained girl. But she listened to them argue and snipe at each other with a feeling of petty satisfaction. Let them tear into each other, Emily thought, and perhaps some opportunity would present itself.

If the witches were easy to deal with, then Delilah was another thing altogether.

Emily didn't know what to do. It was fortunate, perhaps, that Delilah did not see to have any interest in her anymore. She did not have to maintain the act of being Emily's friend, when Emily was likely too far gone to notice.

Once, just once, Emily crouched up in the beams of the manor, watching Delilah below, and she took out the Heart and aimed it at Delilah.

She had not dared to do this before. It had seemed something of a violation to Emily, for some reason. And she would not have liked Delilah to see the Heart and think less of Emily for possessing such a thing.

But it mattered less to her now than knowing Delilah's secrets.

' _She wishes to have a true court_ ,' the Heart whispered to Emily. ' _She is tired of this imitation she has built_.'

Emily didn't know if that was damning, or merely sad. But now she knew she would do anything to break her promise of making Delilah the Lady Regent.

 

* * *

 

Having less compunction about respecting boundaries, Emily returned to Delilah's studio a few more times after the first, usually when she was sure Delilah was otherwise preoccupied. She didn't dare remove anything from the studio, for fear Delilah would notice--Emily was perfectly willing to mess about with the other witches' things, but Delilah was a completely different kettle of hagfish.

But in pawing through Delilah's books and notes for secrets, Emily came across interesting things--scraps of papers with sketches, and notes. She'd learned enough from Granny Rags' lessons to understand what she was reading, even if the things she was reading had not been covered in her lessons. It seemed Delilah had been keeping careful track of her trials and errors, and that helped Emily understand a great deal as well, as Delilah explained to herself in writing why one thing worked, but not another. It was different from Granny Rags' lessons, which were refined over decades of practicing her magics, and distilled from only the most potent Pandyssian secrets. Delilah was powerful, and talented at her craft, but even Emily could tell she was still learning.

Emily discovered Delilah's spell notes for the statues, how they could see even with eyes of stone. Emily had heard the statues could watch for enemies, but she did not realize the full extent of their perceptions until she read Delilah's notes. A chill ran down Emily's back, and she decided to give the statues more of a berth in the future, even if they did not seem to react to her presence.

On a particularly daring trip to the studio, Emily copied the notes Delilah had about making gravehounds.

Emily had some vague notions about figuring some way to counter the gravehounds, to find some weakness in case she ever needed to confront them. She learned that if the skulls were crushed, they'd be gone for good, but Emily could have figured that out herself. The notes were scant on ways to counter the gravehounds. What Emily learned instead was the process of making gravehounds. The main obstacle, it seemed, was the amount of power that the spell required, which none of the witches could achieve without the magic Delilah's favor granted them. But Emily was Marked, same as Delilah, and she hit upon the notion that she could very well summon her own gravehound.

She hesitated, however. She would have asked to try, if she'd still been in Delilah's favor, but now that she'd been relegated to something like a useful doll that would allow Delilah access to the throne, Emily rather doubted she'd be allowed to learn more magic. Even before, Delilah had been delighted to squeeze out any scrap of knowledge that Emily had learned from Granny Rags, but she had never shown any inclination towards teaching Emily any more than she already knew.

Emily's lips tightened as she realized this, too, had been a warning sign, and Emily had ignored it. She found herself irrationally missing Granny Rags, who had been terrifying, but fair in her own way.

Emily shook off the glumness that threatened to sink its teeth in her, and instead bent her head over the notes again, trying to figure out how she could possibly try out the gravehound spell without being detected.

Where would she even get a hound skull, much less without being noticed?

But then, Emily considered, did it have to be a hound's skull? Nothing in the spell notes specified why that would be the case. As far as Emily could tell, hounds were chosen because of how useful they would be as sentries. Loyal and vicious.

Emily would need something that would go unnoticed. Preferably something smaller.

 

* * *

 

It took her three days and more sneaking than she had ever done to gather her necessary things. At one point, Emily even outright gave up on stealth, and wandered into the shed, as if in a daze, and sidled up to Merilee with a completely guileless expression.

"Oh, what nice flowers," Emily remarked airily while peering at Merilee's pots. 

When she'd helped Merilee re-pot her plants, they'd been sprouts just taking shape. Now they had their bushes of leaves, and buds hanging fat and heavy, though yet unopened. The petals would probably be blue, the same flame-blue of burning whale oil.

"They're coming along well," Merilee replied, after a moment of hesitation. Then, as if Emily was going to bite, Merilee awkwardly patted her shoulder and brushed past her to go outside.

Emily lingered, pretending to be entranced by the flowers, and then tilted her head to peer around, activating her dark vision. Merilee was well away, back turned, and nobody else was paying attention. She tiptoed to the cabinet, and took what she needed, stuffing ingredients into her pouches.

After Emily was done, she retreated to a corner of the graveyard, and cleared a small space, tracing her diagram in the mud. She kept looking around with her dark vision, tensely expecting someone to stumble over her at any moment, but there was nobody nearby. If anyone was going to get close, she could sink her hands into the mud and erase all evidence of her work, pretend she was just being some silly girl making mud pies, but thankfully nothing interrupting her work.

She sorted all the ingredients in their appropriate spaced on the diagram next. She consulted her notes carefully, and managed to leave muddy prints all over their edges, but she wanted to get this right the first time.

Then, finally, the last necessary piece. Emily took out the small rat skull from her pouch, placing it on the circle. 

She hummed as she channeled the magic, annoyed to realize it was the lullaby Delilah had sung to her when she first lit the candle, but it was over soon. Sickly black-green light hissed down out of the rat skull, and coalesced into sinew.

The rat raised its head up towards Emily, tiny eyes empty. If it had had a nose, it would probably be twitching, but all it had was the smooth, meatless skull, and empty eyes.

Emily picked it up gingerly, and cradled it to her chest, cooing. It was cold and its skinless body felt like leather, but she ran a finger down its spine anyway, petting it.

She named it Rory.

"You're my only friend here," she imparted to the graverat. It did not respond in any visible way.

 

* * *

 

Emily did not entirely know what a graverat would be good for, but she kept Rory's skull in one of her pouches, dormant for now. She'd taken great pains to hide what she was doing, and letting an undead rat scurry around Brigmore Manor was likely to reveal too much. If she was truly committed to being cautious, Emily should have crushed the skull and hide what she'd done, but she couldn't do it. Her heart couldn't bear to destroy this small work she'd managed.

She tried to figure out how she might expand on this now. If she found bird skulls, would that be useful? Would they turn into something that could even fly, without feathers? She sometimes saw snakes slither across the surface of water--if she got the skull of a snake, could they slither into places even she couldn't reach?

She scrutinized the notes again that evening, sitting at the window before the sun completely set and her light was gone. But it wasn't until she laid down to rest, and after the night sentry came to light her candle, that Emily stumbled upon a revelation. 

She was staring into the flame, one hand curled around the bonecharm under her pillow. The bonecharm kept away the mugginess that threatened to cloud her thoughts at the smell of the candle, but it also dampened her senses. Her nose felt like it was stuffed, unable to smell anything, her hearing was hushed, even her eyesight was hindered somewhat, colors dull and depths harder to judge. But she could maintain her sense of self as long as she had the bonecharm.

But at any rate, she stared at the candle, the only flicker of light in her room, and realized that she'd been thinking about this from the wrong perspective. The notes indicated that hounds had been chosen for their specific uses. They were simply the most natural choice for the job. Before she tried bringing anything from the grave, Emily had to think about what she would need it for. 

She felt foolish for not realizing this sooner; it felt like something that her schooling must have covered at some point, like some lesson that an empress would have learned. Strategic thinking.

So what did Emily want to accomplish?

She thought about it long into the night. Her dreams were not filled with people, but with rats, their tails tangled together as she tried to unknot them.

 

* * *

 

It came back to bonecharms in the end. When Emily dug out the skeleton of the cat from the graveyard--the miniature gravestone helpfully identified the family pet as Mrs. Freeny--she discovered the animal had been buried with her collar still on. She saved the length of chewed leather, and affixed a bonecharm to it.

The cat arose, sleek and slick, no skin or fur, but its claws still attached, and Emily clasped the collar around its neck, and settled the bonecharm off to a side, like it was a bow.

"There we go, Mrs. Freeny. Now nobody will see you," Emily said, adjusting the bonecharm. The smaller the creature wearing the bonecharm, the less noticeable they would be. Emily had found it useful enough for herself, but for something the size of a cat, it would probably render it as good as invisible.

The cat turned its eyes towards Emily. That was the second part of it. Emily had found a taxidermied owl in one of Brigmore's closets, and with some doing, had managed to remove the glass eyes from the dusty remains of the bird.

Emily had struck into the notion when she returned to Delilah's studio, to copy more of her notes. She returned to the notes about the statues, and how they could watch for intruders. Emily wasn't much of a sculptor, but she realized the principles could be applied separately.  The gravecat wasn't a statue--it was better than that, because it could move around--but it was a thing wrought by Emily, and as she understood the notes, that ought to be enough for this to work.

The glass marbles were made to imitate an owl's eyes, but they worked eerily well for a cat, looking more alive than any other part of the animal.

"Well, either this is going to work or..." Emily pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Or you'll have a very nice pair of eyes, I suppose." She picked up a small pebble from the ground and threw it a bit away. The cat's head turned with a dull scrape of bones to follow the movement of the pebble; she still retained the instinct of a mouser, even if she'd likely been nothing but a pampered house pet.

Emily activated her dark vision, then channeled a tiny bit more mana, and activated it again. The magic stuttered like tripping over a threshold, but superimposed over her real vision, Emily could see the afterimages of the pebble flying across the ground, and Mrs. Freeny's gaze whipping to follow it. The cat's eyesight was strange, all the colors smudged with white, but it was clear enough for Emily's purposes.

The image wiped away from Emily's eyes as she blinked.

It was not very crisp, but it was serviceable. She sent the cat on its way.

 

* * *

 

What Emily needed, was a way of getting back to Dunwall.

She'd let herself be distracted by Brigmore, by the witches, by Delilah, by her own childish fear of Daud. But if Daud was coming here, that was doubly reason to leave. And Dunwall was where Emily could go and recover her throne.

It was clearer in her mind now. Before, becoming Empress of the Isles had been some vague future she felt ill-prepared for. She'd been raised as heir to the throne, and assumed her life would continue down that path by inertia. But now spite had risen acidly in her chest, and the throne became something Emily was eager to keep out of Delilah's grasp. Now Emily was willing to fight for it, where before she had planned only to wait until it was within her reach again.

She had to return to Dunwall for that. The Brigmore grounds were now always patrolled, because of the expected interlopers, but the bigger problem was the quarantine. Billie had had a boatsman who knew how to sneak her past the quarantines, but at Breanna's orders, his throat had probably been slit by now, and his boat was gone.

Once Emily got past the witches' patrols, which she was sure she could do easily, she still needed some way of traveling down the Wrenhaven River. That was her focus, and that was what she sent Mrs. Freeny out to scout. Any boats, skiffs, even ships she could stow away on would be useful.

For days, nothing presented itself, no opportunity for escape.

But because Emily was keeping her eye on all the places beneath the witches' notice, she was the first to know when the Whalers came.

 

* * *

 

Emily was sitting on top of the staircase in the backyard, her feet hanging over the edge of the stone banister, heels kicking against the stone lazily. It looked like she was staring into space blankly, which was helpful in that it made the witches think she was still addled, but really she was staring at images from Mrs. Freeny's slow amble up and down the river bank. 

Somewhere, in the distance, a shape had moved over the water. It was blurry, but maybe it was a ship; the shape was a dark blot rising above the waters. Mrs. Freeny made her way slowly through the muddy undergrowth, and emerged somewhere at the very edge of the Brigmore property. The cat always hesitated to venture very far from Brigmore, as if some memory of her old ties to the place stilled her feet.

Emily couldn't really do more than prod Mrs. Freeny this way or that, but with feline contrariness, she sometimes went her own way as she wished. There was also a time delay to the images Emily received, and thus a delay to how quickly she could exert her will on the gravecat. This time, she angled away from the river and back towards Brigmore, creeping through the underbrush towards the fence.

Emily watched for only a bit, just to track where Mrs. Freeny would be, but she intended to just give it up after a few minutes. The images showed the cat was approaching the manor.

But then strange shapes caught Emily's attention. She thought, at first, they might be witches on patrol, but they were a bit too bulky, and moving strangely: crouched and light-footed.

Mrs. Freeny all but brushed up against one, looking up curiously. The shape was blurry, overlapped with white in the brightness of day, but there was no mistaking the mask, especially in profile: it was a Whaler.

Emily shuddered suddenly, so startled that her hold on the images slipped. Whalers were coming, was her first desperate thought. Then the second, even more chilling: the time delay on the images she got from the gravecat. Whalers weren't _coming_ , they were _already there_.

She slipped off her perch on the stone banister, and looked around, alarmed.

Should she warn anyone, Emily wondered? But no, nobody here was her friend. Warn who about what? Certainly not Delilah, who had courted Daud's enmity all by herself.

Instead, a different thought rose to Emily's mind. The Whalers had to have gotten here by ship. The strange shape Mrs. Freeny had seen on the river was, undoubtedly, their mode of transport.

Well, an impish thought arose in Emily's mind, if the Whalers were here for her, she would oblige them. She'd been on the lookout for a ship to stow away on, hadn't she? The Whalers' would serve as well as any. At some point, once they realized they couldn't find her in Brigmore, they would turn the ship back to Dunwall, and she would hop off there.

It was an incredibly mad plan, but Emily couldn't afford to be picky. Odds were, only a mad plan could get her out of Brigmore anyway. This was just her first opportunity.

She was giddy with the simplicity of this plan, so much so that when she hopped down and started to traverse the back yard, she didn't pause to question why it was empty of witches. She trailed to a stop by the fountain, where the tray filled with grapes and sausages was left abandoned, the food nibbled but unfinished. 

Weren't Agnes and Adelaide on guard here today? Emily felt apprehension shoot up her spine, and she turned to walk quickly back, suddenly afraid of this wide open space.

She got two steps before all the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she felt the familiar sound of air being displaced. She tried to break into a run just as arms came around her--not again, not a third time!--but this time she didn't waste any of her time struggling. 

She hooked her far reach onto the windowsill of the nearby shed. She could feel the stickiness of the spell, and knew that any far reach would transport the person hanging on to her right alongside her, but that was what Emily was counting on. With a flick of the wrist, the far reach brought her onto the windowsill, in a crouch.

The Whaler holding her, being much taller, smacked his head right into the upper edge of the window as the far reach pulled him along, and Emily heard the dull thud, the low, pained moan, and felt the arms loosen instantly. She was almost disappointed the Whaler hadn't cracked his skull, but then, maybe the mask offered some protection. 

Another far reach took her up through the broken roof, onto the edge of a building, along the manor's back way and through the greenhouse.

She didn't see Whalers, at first, but Emily noticed the conspicuous absence of witches, and dropped down in the greenhouse next to the unconscious body of Marjorie, piled into a shadowed corner by the fountain.

Emily activated her dark vision, watching. She caught the glimpse of the Whaler crouched at the corner of the greenhouse and the manor wall, maybe shielded from view, but brightly orange in her Void-powered gaze. She'd go through the graveyard, she decided. She had to climb a tree once when a couple of Whalers blinked into the graveyard, and she kept still like a frightened animal up in the branches as she saw them fix the lever to the crypt entrance.

With some despair, she realized there would only be more Whalers at their ship, but if they were going to confront Delilah, then hopefully she and her witches would keep the Whalers busy for as long as necessary.

Emily flitted over the fence, then paused teetering on one of the leftover beams of an old wooden bridge along the cliff, as she considered whether she should try to get Mrs. Freeny before she went. It was a foolish risk, but her heart also ached at leaving behind such good work as the gravecat.

She was indecisive for too long, and after another sweep with her dark vision, she realized there were Whaler patrols along the edge of Brigmore as well. Another thing to avoid, she thought, as she slung down in one tug of her far reach.

She could be quiet, she'd learned to tip-toe her way around any manner of places. Once, long ago, Corvo had taught her the quiet step he could use to sneak right up behind a person. She'd learned only the basics, but had applied that to great extent since being on her own. Unfortunately, the ground around Brigmore was ankle-deep water, and impossible not to splash around. Even her far reach left a trail behind, like the wake of a ship passing over water, and disproportionately loud in the silence of the Mutcherhaven District.

She had to get to the river, that was all that mattered. She crossed the open space quickly, almost incautiously, but no hands grabbed at her, so she thought she was clear.

She perched up on an outbuilding, lonely and half-collapsed outside the manor grounds, and she looked over the path towards the river. There didn't seem to be anyone, she noticed satisfied. Possibly all the Whalers were converging on the manor.

She clambered near the very edge of the roof, reached out her left hand--

There was a 'thunk!', and a sudden burning ache in her shoulder, as if she'd been hit with something.

She looked down, and stared at the sleep dart hanging from her jacket, off her right shoulder, almost failing to understand what she was looking at. It was a couple of seconds at most, but her brain didn't have the time to catch up with reality before the nausea hit, and a sudden vertigo. The world spun backwards and forwards, tilting wildly to and fro.

Emily felt herself wobbling in directions she did not mean to go, and then, alarmingly, just when she thought she got her feet back under her, she tilted forward--and forward-- and forward-- right over the edge of the building.

As the world whisked past her and the ground approached at speed, Emily had a single, heart-wrenching moment of being faced with her own mortality, the visceral knowledge that she would not survive hitting the ground from this height, at this speed.

Then there was a flicker, the sudden appearance of a bright red coat, and she was twisted in mid-air, the air knocked out of her by the impact, but her neck very much unbroken as she was sure it would be just a moment earlier.

She had a few more moments of consciousness, the sensation of being turned over in someone's arms to be held properly, and then she looked up. The last thing she saw before unconsciousness swept her under was Daud's face, looking down at her, a frown pinching his brows together.

 

* * *

 

Emily escaped the gray grip of sedation in a series of flinches, and scattered moments of awareness, before she managed to get a grip on the waking world. Her mouth was dry, cottony, and her lids were so heavy, that she did not try to open them even after she was awake.

That was probably for the best, she thought, as she did not wish to reveal to her captors that she was awake yet. Instead she took careful stock of what she could sense of her environment. She was on a cot, she thought; the sheets were cheap and rough, smelling like old sweat and lye. The pillow under her head was filled with straw. 

She curled her toes, slowly, making sure her body had woken as she had. They'd taken her shoes off. They'd also taken her belt with its pouches, and her jacket. She thought she was still in the grips of vertigo, but she realized the strange bobbing motions she felt were real, and that she was on a ship. This was not how she wanted to end up on a ship.

She heard breathing, somewhere in the room, close by. A guard, then.

Carefully, Emily cracked open her eyelids, just enough to see through her eyelashes, but not enough for her eyes to appear open. The cabin was smaller than she expected, the walls close together. There was a chair up against the wall next to her cot, but the cabin was so narrow that the person in the chair had their knees propped against the side of the cot.

Emily saw blue, the dull shade of a Whaler's coat. No mask, though, and when she looked to his face-- She was so startled that she opened her eyes fully, no matter how foolhardy that was.

Slumped in the chair next to her cot, chin down against his chest, hair now grown long and wild, was Corvo.

Emily felt something rise in her chest, threatening to overflow, held down by the fear that this might not be real.

Corvo's face was set in hard lines, wrinkles where Emily had never seen wrinkles before, a few strands of white in his hair, deep dark circles of unrest around his eyes.

But it was him, Emily assured her own distraught heart, and a sob escaped her mouth before tears had even had the time to build up.

Corvo startled at the sound, head shooting up, eyes opening. His gaze was feverish and confused for a moment, before they settled on Emily, and then it was like he lit up from inside, coming truly alive.

"Emi--"

Emily flung herself at Corvo, bawling loud and messy like she hadn't in months, and he caught her in his arms without a moment's hesitation. She curled up into his lap, clinging to his coat as her tears finally spilled over.

She was too old to sit in laps or be rocked like a toddler, but Corvo curled around her anyway, his arms desperately tight as he whispered soothing nonsense against her hair. She didn't know who he was trying to reassure more. After a few minutes, she felt the hot drip of his own tears fall and disappear into her hair.

It was terrible and wonderful, each sob clawing its way out of Emily painfully and leaving her feeling lighter and lighter on the inside, until countless minutes had passed, and Emily felt completely hollow inside, scoured clean of a terrible loneliness she hadn't even noticed until it had lifted.

 

* * *

 

Eventually, after her sobs finally subsided, Emily disentangled herself from Corvo, sitting back on the bed, looking him over properly. His coat sagged in places it hadn't before, as if his frame couldn't properly fill it again. Emily's stomach wrenched in distress at the length of time he had spent in Coldridge, all while she was rambling across rooftops, free as a bird.

"You must be thirsty," Corvo said suddenly, rising from his seat, and going towards the other end of the cabin, where a small table was set next to the door. There was a carafe of water and a couple of glasses there. He filled a glass and brought it to Emily, who drank it all greedily, and then he refilled it for her, which she also drank. 

Emily only took a few sips of the glass when it was refilled for her again, holding it on top of her knee as she licked her lips and felt their chapped edges smooth down again.

"How did you save me from Daud?" was the first thing Emily asked.

Corvo froze for a moment, just as he was lowering himself back into the chair, but then he slumped down the rest of the way, and his expression turned hesitant.

Emily felt a twinge of dread--he'd saved her from Daud, hadn't he? Or...? She looked around the cabin, trying to determine if this was yet another cell, if now they were both Daud's prisoners.

"Emily, Daud helped me save you," Corvo said.

Emily blinked, the statement so nonsensical that she wasn't sure she understood the words right.

But Corvo began explaining. His voice was hoarse, and sometimes it gave out on him, and he had to stop for a few moments and swallow until it came back to him, but he told her as much as he could.

 

* * *

 

What Corvo told her was this: he'd been prisoner in Coldridge for nearly six months, when Lord Regent Burrows and Overseer Campbell abruptly lost interest in visiting him. The prison was awash in rumor, none of it reliable, but Corvo overheard enough worrisome chatter from the guards to know that whatever had happened, it had to do with Emily.

For the next few months, things at Coldridge changed; more prisoners cycled through, and more executions were on the docket than ever. Corvo suspected his turn hadn't come yet solely because Burrows and Campbell had forgotten about him. He planned to escape the first opportunity he got, but unfortunately, opportunities were not arising. He admitted this last part shame-faced, avoiding Emily's eyes, as if he was sure he would see disappointment if he looked into her face. Emily reached out instead to take his hand, curling her fingers around his.

The story picked up a couple of weeks earlier, when, of all people, Daud came to break him out. Corvo was not willing to trust the assassin, but this was also the first real chance he could see of escaping, so, he reasoned he would slip away later from the Whalers, and go his own way to find Emily.

But Daud took any wind out of that plan when he revealed that one of his people knew where Emily could be found, and additionally that he was going to go and save Emily from the witches holding her, with or without Corvo's help. His presence was only required in as much as Daud knew very well Emily didn't trust her mother's assassins, and would only try to escape them again.

Corvo smiled at that 'again', and Emily grinned at his sly sidelong look. She puffed up under Corvo's pride and amusement, as he congratulated her for giving the Whalers more grief than they expected.

The next couple of weeks consisted largely of preparations for the trip to Brigmore Manor. They managed to secure a ship: the Dead Eels had recently come under weaker leadership as Lizzy Stride's second-in-command took over, and with their conflict with the Hatters distracting them, it was easy enough to steal the Undine right from under their noses. More difficulty was actually getting the Undine to work, as it was missing a part, but they acquired the service of a disgraced natural philosopher who managed to rig the ship anyway.

Another thing Emily had missed while at Brigmore was that Geoff Curnow was dishonorably dismissed as Captain of the Watch, blamed by Burrows for failing to find Emily, in some ploy to deflect blame for the situation. This worked in their favor, as Curnow knew the best way to pass through the quarantine on the river, and while he was not precisely ecstatic about helping a band of assassins, he trusted Corvo well enough, and at the very least wanted Emily brought back.

After that, it was all a matter of confronting the witches, and Delilah, and making sure Emily wasn't caught in the crossfire or hurt too badly. So they chose stealth once they reached Brigmore, carefully picking off the witches one by one.

"It went well, all things considered," Corvo said slowly. Then, that sly smile again, "I think one of the worst injuries on our side was the concussion you gave to one of the Whalers."

"Well, he shouldn't have put his hands on me," Emily replied, feeling entirely too pleased with herself. "What about Delilah, is she dead?"

Corvo's smile vanished.

"Delilah... wasn't there," Corvo said slowly.

"What?" Emily stiffened. "But..."

She thought back on the day, but she couldn't recall seeing Delilah anywhere, or even hearing the witches talk about where she might be. Had she left Brigmore, on one of her infrequent forays into Dunwall? Had she chosen that very day, by some unlikely coincidence, to leave?

"Then where is she now?" Emily asked.

"We don't know," Corvo said. "We left after we got you."

Fear panged in Emily's chest, but Corvo's hand fell heavy and warm on her shoulder, and the contact was more reassuring than anything she'd experienced in the past months.

"You're safe now," Corvo promised. "Don't worry."

Emily nodded distractedly, then hugged Corvo again.

 

* * *

 

The Undine would soon be in Dunwall, and Corvo suggested that, if Emily wanted, she could stay below decks until they arrived. But Emily was restless, and she needed to see for herself that she was far and away from Brigmore.

It was an overcast late noon that she emerged into, the winds whipping cold. There was a Whaler perched right on top of a crate as Emily emerged from below decks, and as he turned to look at her, Emily tried not to wilt. She had Corvo at her back, a few steps behind and to the right, as he'd always stood behind her mother. She tried to remember that she was not hiding or running anymore, so she squared her shoulders and raised her chin.

She took stock of her surroundings; there were other Whalers on the deck, crewing the ship, or keeping a lookout. There was one perched right at the Undine's highest point, over the bridge, surveying the river with a spyglass.

"Will you be alright?" Corvo asked, a low murmur unheard by anyone.

Emily's gaze flicked from the nearest Whaler to sweep over the deck, and then she nodded.

"I'll be fine," she said, then, before she could lose her nerve, "Where's Daud?"

Corvo hesitated, before gesturing towards the ship's bow. 

Emily tried to show no hesitation as she headed that way. She didn't precisely hurry along, but she did not let her steps falter as she headed for the bow. She saw Daud's red coat soon enough, and as she approached and rounded past on of the platform, a second red coat: Billie.

She had her mask off, cradled in her hands as she spoke, her eyes lowered.

Whatever Billie was saying to Daud, Emily only caught the tail end of it as she stepped close.

"--Don't worry, I'll be gone as soon as we dock."

"Where are you going?" Emily blurted out suddenly, and both Billie and Daud's eyes turned to her, startled by the interruption. They'd seen her walk towards them, so it was probably the question they hadn't been expecting.

Emily latched onto Billie's wrist, insistent.

"Where are you going?" Emily asked.

Billie opened her mouth to speak, her eyes flicking over to Daud before settling back on Emily, and she licked her lips nervously before she replied.

"Emily, I... need to leave Dunwall. After all that's happened, I... can't stay." Billie's lips tightened, her face flushing with shame.

In all the chaos, Emily had forgotten that Billie's entire deal with Delilah had been for the sake of killing and replacing Daud. But Delilah had been the one Billie betrayed in the end, and now Emily wondered what she had had to tell Daud to convince him she truly knew where Emily had been hidden. Even a fraction of the truth was damning.

"Yes, you can," Emily insisted, pulling Billie's wrist as if to drag her away. "You don't have to stay with Daud, but you don't have to leave Dunwall. He doesn't get a say whether or not you can stay in the city, _I_ do." She glared at Daud, challenging him to contradict her.

But Daud was silent, and stone-faced. His expression was infuriatingly hard to read, so much that he might as well have worn a mask.

"Emily, it's not as simple as that," Billie said, and tried to pry Emily's grip loose from her wrist. 

"Yes, it is!" Emily insisted, resisting the urge to stomp her foot in frustration. "Everything's already a mess, for everyone. You're not the only one who's made mistakes, and you shouldn't be the only one to leave because of that!"

Billie's eyebrows rose nearly to her hairline, but at least she stopped her protestations, if only for a few moments.

Daud's soft snort broke the silence, and he reached over to take the Whaler's mask from Billie's hands.

"Listen to your Empress," he drawled, and Emily turned to glare at him, sure that she was being mocked. 

But Billie's expression softened, wavered with indecision.

"Daud--" she began, so softly that it was almost lost to the wind.

Daud shook his head, turning the mask over in his hands.

"You are what I made out of you, Billie," he said, staring into the glass eyes of the mask. "I'm as much to blame for what happened as you are. More, I'd say. But people like us don't get second chances often. Think carefully about what you want to do. You're no coward."

Billie exhaled slowly, her shoulders sagging as tension drained out of her, but Emily didn't know if Billie was relieved or disappointed. 

"Alright," Billie said, at Emily's expectant expression. "I'll stay."

Emily grinned, and wrapped her arms around Billie's middle in a hug. Billie didn't push Emily away, only patted her shoulder awkwardly.

"I'll be below deck," Billie murmured afterwards, and left as if in a daze.

Emily would have wanted to follow, to keep Billie company or at least get her story about what happened after she left Brigmore that last time, but Emily had come here to talk to Daud, and she wasn't going to be a coward either. 

"Just because you agreed with me, doesn't mean I forgive you," Emily muttered darkly to Daud.

He inclined his head, just a bit.

"I wouldn't expect you to. And after all this is over," he spoke slowly, "if we both come out the other side of it alive, then my life is in your hands."

Emily felt inexplicable anger rise inside her. She tried to picture it, Daud's head on the chopping block, but his willingness to let himself be punished took all the satisfaction that Emily would have felt right out of it. She felt robbed.

"You and all the Whalers?" she asked, wondering if more spilled blood would even make a difference.

"Emily," Corvo said, his voice low and worried.

"I'm the bearing the responsibility," Daud said, sounding as argumentative as Emily would have expected during the exchange with Billie. "I made the plans, I set the goal, and I put the coins into their hands when the job was done. Only thing I can offer is my own life, and I'll do that ten times over before I allow you to take my debt out of my Whalers' hides. When it comes down to it, you decide what kind of Empress you plan to be. But this is my sin to bear, not theirs."

Emily knew right then, with a flash of insight, that if she truly, deeply wanted to hurt this man, then she would let him live, and execute his Whalers instead. Some wounded part of her wanted to do just that, to see if he could keep his stony face as his people were strung up one by one.

But she understood, too, that he had a point. She had to decide what kind of Empress she was going to be. Her mother had always been kind and just, and she had been killed by traitors anyway. Had it been kindness that killed her? 

No, Emily thought, remembering all of her days spent across Dunwall's rooftops. There was more kindness missing from the world that even Empress Jessamine could have poured into it, and she had wasted it on people who did not return it. On people like the Spymaster and the High Overseer.

Now Emily found herself heir to the throne, having to consider things as an Empress might, and she suddenly saw the path of compromise that this role would demand of her, stretched out before her like a dark sea with choppy waters.

Daud was... an assassin. The worst that Dunwall had to offer. But Billie had been an assassin as well, and now, in these troubled time, when Emily found herself surrounded by enemies and at a loss for allies, Daud was the one working to help her, where others did not. Daud was the one who broke Corvo out, who saved her from Delilah, who offered his own head on a platter.

"I'll never forgive you," Emily said matter-of-factly.

"You shouldn't," Daud replied.

She felt infuriated by his easy acceptance of his own guilt.

"Tell me why," she demanded.

She saw the bitter twist to Daud's mouth, but he obeyed, and he unfolded the entire tale of his regret for her to judge, a simple explanation with no excuses for himself.

And Emily couldn't understand all of it, couldn't imagine doing such things, but she had seen enough in the past year to understand just a little bit of what a hard life turned people into. She couldn't forgive Daud, but as she tried to mentally reconcile the ruthless killer of her nightmares with the regretful man before her, she thought she understood, at least in part, the kind of Empress she had to be for the kind of Empire she'd inherited.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There, see? Corvo's fine. He's fine. Everyone's fine. Absolutely nothing is wrong in Dunwall, haha.


	7. Playground

The Whalers were based in the Flooded District. Emily had never been there, not when her mother was alive, and not even afterwards, when she'd been on her own in Dunwall for all those months. After hearing that plague victims were being sent to the Flooded District, she did her best to avoid the place. By some twist of fate, that meant she never came across the Whalers' hideout, even though with her powers she could have foolishly slipped in without even knowing the danger.

Or, Emily supposed, not really. Since she'd escaped the Golden Cat, Daud and his Whalers had been looking for her in order to help her out. If she'd been less cautious and actually gotten caught by them, things would have probably turned out differently. Things would have equally turned out differently if Delilah hadn't supposedly rescued her when they caught her at the waterfront.

But then, Corvo was the only reason she hadn't tried to escape this time as well, and without his presence, she would have been insufferably recalcitrant. Perhaps, Emily considered, things had turned out well enough in the end. They certainly could have taken worse turns.

They disembarked the Undine quietly, the Whalers dispersing quickly until only a few were left as escort. Daud went ahead as well, if only to spare Emily the discomfort, but Corvo stuck close.

Only Billie teetered uncertainly on the shore, turning to look from the Undine, to Dunwall's skyline, uncertainly.

"You've put her in an awkward position," Corvo told Emily, keeping his voice low. "The other Whalers know about her betrayal by now. Daud might have forgiven her, but she was planning to leave for a reason."

Emily felt a twinge of guilt at this. She hadn't thought, when she insisted Billie stay, how uncomfortable it would be for her. Maybe even dangerous; would the other Whalers try to take revenge?

But there was no going back now. She'd asked Billie to stay, so now it was something they would all of them have to deal with.

She trotted up to Billie, taking her hand, trying to be reassuring.

"Billie," Emily said, "do you have anywhere else to go other than the Flooded District?"

Relief flooded Billie's face, only compounding Emily's guilt.

"I have a safe house I set up a while ago," Billie said. 

"Could you show Corvo where it is?" Emily asked. "So we know where to find you."

"Sure," Billie agreed easily. She nodded to Corvo. "Lord Protector."

Corvo hesitated, however, looking to Emily.

"Will you be alright?" he asked. "Going by yourself with..." He trailed off, jabbing his chin in the direction of the nearest Whaler, who stoically pretended not to notice the exchange.

Emily was reminded now that Corvo did not know how truly alone she had been this past year. She'd given him only the barest bones account of her life during their separation, and she hadn't been able to explain the emotional dimension of it, the words still beyond her reach. But she was fine. She'd been surrounded by nothing but dangerous individuals for a while now. It was too late to worry about that anymore.

And she had to show that she could let Corvo out of her sight, that she was not a desperate clinging creature now that they'd been reunited. She didn't know if it was because she wanted Corvo to know she was strong, or because she didn't want the Whalers to see she was weak, but it felt like the thing she had to do.

"You're the one who made friends with them," Emily retorted, her voice light.

"I wouldn't exactly describe them as--" Corvo stopped, considering, and the corner of his lip twitched in a smile. "Yes, alright. I'll go with Billie."

"Be careful," Emily said, unable to quell the twist of anxiety, even if she was the one sending him away.

He pressed his hand, gentle and warm, to the top of Emily had, not quite ruffling her hair.

"I'll be back with you as soon as I can," he promised.

Emily nodded, believing him. She still cast one last look over her shoulder before going to follow the Whalers.

 

* * *

 

The trip to the Flooded District was uneventful. Her far reaches didn't have quite the same range as the Whalers' transversals, but because she was so light and small, she often teleported herself in places that the Whalers avoided: narrower ledges, rickety overhangs. They set their pace according to hers, and fell in a loose formation around her. An honor guard, Emily thought, not sure if she was amused by the thought or not.

She stopped only once, when she first came across a row of houses burnt out up and down a street. She stared at the blackened, skeletal remains of the buildings. On one wall, the smoke had not quite managed to smear away the graffiti; 'Send us food not bullets'. The Whalers waited, quiet, until Emily got her fill of the sight, and then they continued on.

Emily smelled the must of the Flooded District before she saw it, but she knew they'd passed into it. Even the streets not flooded were lined with collapsing buildings, the smell of plague and wet garbage as familiar and unwelcome as ever. This wasn't like Brigmore's elegant decay, where nature was slowly reclaiming the building piece by piece. This was an entire district of Dunwall crumbling to nothing, rotting apart to no sane end.

She was going to drain this place, Emily thought. Rebuild the dam, level everything to the ground, and rebuild from the foundation. Leave no place for assassins to hide, and leave no rudderless orphans to grow up into brutes and killers. She swore to herself, no matter how deep she had to dig to find the root of this plague, she would pull it out completely. Maybe then... Well, it wasn't worth considering until she had the throne back.

The Whaler base was a lot like the rest of the district, flooded and half-collapsed, but there were obvious signs of people still living there: walkways built from scavenged bits, lights at windows, s few patched holes here and there. She was ushered almost without noticing to the old Chamber of Commerce, and a Whaler in blue showed her to Daud's office. He opened the door for her and invited her in with a flourish.

"Your Highness," he said, half-bowing, and there was a grin in his voice. Emily resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him as she walked in.

She didn't know what she'd been expecting, but she was somewhat surprised by the notion that assassins also used desks and filing cabinets and corkboards like normal people. If she had been picturing anything about where assassins did their plotting, she would have guessed in a darkened room, sitting around a table, while sharpening their knives. The reality was startlingly mundane; there was even an audiograph player on one of the desks.

Daud was there, standing behind one of the desks, leaning with a fist against the surface. He looked up as she walked in. His face was naturally dour, but he made a visible effort to appear less stern, perhaps not wanting to frighten her. She trotted right up to him.

"The Royal Protector's not here?" Daud asked, something pointed in the question.

"He'll be along," Emily said, raising her chin. 

Her eyes slipped to the boards behind Daud, bedecked with wanted posters annotated in red. Most were criminals--bounties that the Whalers hunted down, probably. But the central board was taken over by sketched portraits of the Lord Regent, the High Overseer, the Pendletons--the masterminds of the coup. 

"So what now?" she asked.

"Now we hatch a conspiracy for the throne," Daud groused. "I hear that's fashionable these days."

 

* * *

 

After the anarchic leisure that characterized life at Brigmore Manor, life with the Whalers seemed almost regimented. 

Emily was assigned a bed in one of the less drafty rooms in the Chamber of Commerce buildings, and she found that the chest at the foot of the bed had already been stocked with some basic items: some toiletries, a blank notebook and some writing implements--a half used box of crayons among them--some clothes in her size, of varying make and quality, but clean and lovingly mended. 

There was a doll left on the bed, and a stack of books on the end table, which indicated to Emily that Corvo might have actually been the one responsible for the contents of her room. The doll wasn't Mrs. Pilsen, but it was something, and it made Emily's chest ache strangely. She picked it up and buried her face in the doll's hair, trying to recall a time when she'd felt safe and a lost doll was the worst thing that could happen to her.

This was where she would be spending her time until her throne was hers once again. Daud had already laid out a list of conspirators that they would have to eliminate, one way or another, to clear her way. He'd suggested going after the High Overseer first. Apart from the fact that he was currently more ascendant in power and influence than the Lord Regent, he had also recently moved against the Whalers, sending Overseers into the Flooded District, at least partially at Delilah's order. Emily couldn't argue that he needed to be removed from power, so she approved, and she agreed to wait until Daud's spies returned with as much information about the Overseer as possible.

She emptied her pouches of all the excess items she'd been carrying around when she was fearful that the witches would poke through her room and find them. She put away her most valuable bonecharms, and she removed all the notes she'd copied on Delilah's magic, smoothing out the folded papers and pressing them between the blank pages of the blank notebook, at the bottom of the chest.

After she was done, she left the room by the way of the window, not in the mood to cross paths with the Whalers patrolling the hallways outside her door. But when she climbed out and onto the walkway outside the window, she discovered there was a blue-coated Whaler out there as well, leaning against the wall of the building with his arms crossed. He'd been just behind a corner, hidden from sight until Emily was already out. He tipped his head in her direction, in greeting.

"Lady Emily," the Whaler said. "I thought I'd offer a tour."

Emily narrowed her eyes at him. He'd been waiting for her, she was sure.

"It's no palace, of course," the Whaler continued, unabashed by her silence, "but I like to think we make do well enough."

"Corvo showed me around a bit," she said.

"Ah, but does Corvo know where the the best fishing spots are?" the Whaler asked.

"Well, since the only things likely to survive in the water here are hagfish, I'm guessing anywhere other than the Flooded District?" Emily offered innocently.

The Whaler put a hand to his chest, as if wounded.

"But you can show me the other stuff, if you want," Emily continued, "if you think it's going to be that impressive."

"I accept the challenge," the Whaler agreed with a laugh.

 

* * *

 

The Whaler introduced himself as Rulfio, and began the tour by showing her where she could get food, in an improvised canteen in one of the base's outbuildings. Meals were served twice a day, but a lot of the Whalers kept erratic schedules depending on the jobs they were assigned, so there were people eating there at just about any time of day or night.

After that, Rulfio took Emily to see one of the Whalers who handled supplies.

"You can requisition just about anything you need here," he said.

"Like what?" Emily asked, peering around at the crates along the walls. 

There was a workbench in a corner, and a table taking up the middle of the room, with mines and bolts and a half-disassembled wristbow strewn in pieces across its surface. The quartermaster was fiddling with the firing mechanism of the wristbow.

"Like... things you'd need," Rulfio said, and he seemed to have a difficult time recalling any example other than weapons, since at the moment that was the only thing in sight. "Bonecharms--"

"I make my own. What else?" Emily persisted.

"--And uh... bottles..." Rulfio looked around for inspiration, finding himself surrounded by far too many deadly implements.

"Of what?" Emily asked. 

"Poison, for instance," the quartermasters replied sedately.

"Of course you won't be needing that," Rulfio said quickly.

"You don't know, maybe I might," Emily replied, just to be contrary.

The quartermaster laughed softly.

"I provide a variety of things," he explained. "Clothing, armor weaves, weaponry, books. Had someone come in asking for a clock. A new pillow and blankets. Boots. Anything someone needs, I get it for them."

Emily picked up a crossbow bolt from the table, then placed it back down to pick up an empty sleep dart.

"Anything?" Emily asked.

"Within reason," the quartermaster amended.

"Can I get a wristbow?" Emily asked.

Rulfio and the quartermaster shared a look over Emily's head, unreadable with their masks on, but they probably knew each other well enough to guess what they were thinking.

"That's one of the things you provide, isn't it?" Emily persisted.

"This is a bit unusual," Rulfio said. He shifted in place, obviously uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was going.

"Are you even trained with one?" the quartermaster asked.

"Yes, what will your Royal Protector think of you getting a wristbow?" Rulfio said, seizing on this opening.

"Well, maybe I mean to learn," Emily said. "I'd need to get one to train with it, wouldn't I?"

"You're a bit young," the quartermaster said, hitting to the heart of their discomfort.

Emily bristled at that, frustrated that after the year she'd had, only now were adults concerned with her safety, with treating her like a child again. These adults most of all, responsible for all the misery she'd experienced. The hypocrisy of their concern burned in Emily like acid in the veins.

"It's a bit late for you to worry about that," she said, and a startled silence fell at the venom in her voice. They froze, looking at her, or not wanting to look at her; could have been either, with their masks.

The quartermaster was the first to move, slowly, as he shuffled towards a nearby chest. He opened it, taking out a wristbow, and shuffled back towards Emily.

"Let me see your arm," he requested.

Emily extended her arm almost numbly, and the quartermaster leaned down, slipping the sleeve of the wristbow onto her forearm. The sleeve had a few notches, like a belt, so it could be buttoned on tighter or looser, but even at the tightest notch, the sleeve was entirely too loose for Emily's skinny forearm, leaving enough room for it twice over.

"Oh," Emily breathed out, crestfallen. 

"S'not exactly like a big pair of boots, can't just stuff a sock in it," the quartermaster said.

"It's alright. Sorry for bothering you," Emily shook her head, disappointed. She felt her cheeks burn up. Now that her anger was draining away, she felt foolish instead.

The quartermaster shuffled back to the same chest, putting the wristbow back, but then he removed something else from inside: a miniature crossbow, of the regular kind that could be held in the hand.

"Never too early to practice your aim," the quartermaster said, as he offered her the crossbow. "I do insist you keep it to the training dummies for now, though."

Emily brightened immediately at receiving the item, and nodded eagerly.

"I will, I promise!" she said a bit too quickly, and then picked up an entire handful of crossbow bolts from the table.

Rulfio gave the quartermaster a look over Emily's head. The quartermaster shrugged. Emily did not notice.

"You can show me the training dummies next," she informed Rulfio.

 

* * *

 

Rulfio did indeed show her the training room next, which turned out to be three quarters of a room, considering it was missing a wall and most of the ceiling.

That was where Corvo found Emily, when he finally returned. She didn't notice him at first, concentrating as she was on aiming her crossbow towards the dummy, but Corvo sidled up next to Rulfio to watch.

The bolt went off and embedded itself into the chest of the dummy, sinking through straw-stuffed canvas into the wood beneath with a thunk.

Emily whipped around with a grin on her face which only turned more delighted when she saw Corvo. She hopped up to him, tackling him into a hug.

"Corvo! You're back! Did you see that?" she asked.

"I did," Corvo agreed. "You're a very good shot. Did you just learn?"

"Rulfio says I'm a natural," Emily informed him smugly, then ran up to the dummy to remove the bolt.

"You gave a ten-year-old a crossbow," Corvo addressed Rulfio, his tone completely flat, but the disapproval coming clear through to Emily. 

He'd used that tone before, with nobles who overstepped in some way, and Corvo wanted to scold them without Emily knowing he was scolding them. He probably assumed that only the adults listening would know the meaning of that tone, but Emily had learned it too, though she tried not to give any indication of it.

Right now she could imagine Rulfio's sheepishness. Considering he had been the one to protest her getting a wristbow, it was not exactly fair for Corvo to put this on him, but Emily relished the thought of Corvo making a Whaler squirm anyway.

She had to jiggle the bolt until it loosened, and then it popped free suddenly, making her stagger back a step. She walked up to Corvo just as he was shooting narrow-eyed glares at Rulfio.

"Corvo, you could teach me swords!" Emily said suddenly, and Corvo gave her a startled look, forgetting all about Rulfio. "Nobody's going to complain and say mean things behind your back anymore, so you can teach me to use a real sword now!"

"Emily--" Corvo began.

"Pleeeeease?" she wheedled, tugging his sleeve as she gave him her best pleading look. "I should really learn these things, I'm almost constantly in danger! Don't you want me to be able to protect myself?"

Corvo's resistance crumbled in the face of this particular argument. Emily almost felt bad for playing this card. But it was not inaccurate. 

"All right," Corvo said, "We'll... we'll get you started with a practice sword. You can learn some of the basics." Then he shook his head, and muttered, mostly to himself, "I'm sure it can't hurt," though it didn't sound like he believed it.

Emily grinned, looking forward to the lessons. This wouldn't be the play-fighting with wooden sticks that he had once or twice allowed for her to string him into, but then, there were no gossipy nobles to disapprove anymore. She looked forward to spending the time with Corvo as much as she did to the lessons themselves.

Rulfio crossed his arms as he looked at Corvo, and although his mask hid his expression, his body language was plenty vindicated. 'See? And you were criticizing me for it.'

 

* * *

 

"Are you going to kill the High Overseer?"

The question landed with an almost audible thud among the Whalers. The background murmur of conversations cut off completely, all the attention in the room sucked in by Daud as they expected his reaction. The Whalers, three or four spread around the room, turned their masked faces towards their leader.

Daud, for his part, made no outward sign of having even heard the question. His hands clasped behind his back, he looked at the board before him; a sketch of the High Overseer was circled in red, and a map of Holger Square was annotated in the same red color, with routes and hiding spots. Daud's gaze did not leave the map as he answered.

"There are other options," he said.

"But killing him is an option too," Emily said.

"Is that what you want, Highness?" Daud asked, his gaze shifting towards Emily, gray and blank. "To order an assassination?"

"I'm not ordering, I just want to know," she replied, feeling indignant at what she perceived as a criticism. It was a fair question, she thought.

"You want to know if I'll kill him on my own, so you won't have blood on your hands?" Daud said.

Emily made a choked sound in her throat, and turned to look at Corvo, almost reflexively.

She wasn't sure what she was expecting from Corvo, exactly. He always bent to her requests in the end, and if she did insist on the High Overseer being killed, and he couldn't make her change her mind, he'd change his own mind to suit her. There were times when Emily had felt the chasm between Empress and Royal Protector, had intuited it on some level, but it had become more obvious since being reunited with Corvo. She wished she hadn't noticed it. 

Corvo looked at her uncertainly, like he wasn't sure he knew her anymore, or what she wanted. It broke her heart just a little.

"You don't want him to die, Emily," he said, but she knew it was a question more than anything.

She made a frustrated sound.

"I want him to die a little," Emily said, just to be contrary, "but it's not like I'm saying _we_ have to kill him."

Some of the lines in Corvo's face smoothed out a bit, and his hand rose as if to ruffle her hair, but hesitated halfway there, and settled on the back of Emily's shoulders, cradling the back of her neck.

"So what other options are there, anyway?" Emily asked.

Daud unfolded a piece of paper then, smoothed out the creases before sticking it to the corkboard.

"The Heretic's Brand," he said, just as grimly as if discussing murder. For the High Overseer, it may well have been worse than death.

 

* * *

 

Daud left, along with his Whalers, and Emily found she didn't feel like sitting in the Flooded District, waiting with baited breath for their return.

"Let's go visit Billie," Emily told Corvo, and he agreed to take her, perhaps understanding her need for a distraction.

It was strange traveling across rooftops with Corvo. Not just because of the fact that their modes of transversing the city were very different; Emily still relied heavily on her far reaches, even though she'd learned a fair deal about climbing and sneaking. She was small, and the proportionate body strength of a ten-year-old was nothing to write home about.

But she'd never seen Corvo moving like this. In Dunwall Tower, or in public, trailing after the Empress, he had always had the poise of a soldier or a fighter, watchful but ready to react. Here, across the rooftops, there was something less of that, and more of the Serkonan wildness that Emily had heard the court criticize him for, so many times.

He ran in graceful strides, leapt from ledge to ledge, landed in hard rolls and pulled himself up and up, with such a sense of glee that a hound might have upon being let off his leash. He had no trouble keeping up with Emily even without any supernatural aid, though she would, on occasion, grab his arm and take him along on a far reach across some more inconvenient obstacles that he might otherwise have to go around.

They were nearly at Billie's safehouse before Corvo even looked the tiniest bit winded. They had to duck through a rooftop door, into the stairwell of a building to avoid a tallboy patrol, and they sat down on the stairs to wait as it passed.

"I forgot how much I missed doing this," he confessed to Emily. "Back in Karnaca..."

He trailed off as he looked in the distance.

"Well," he continued, a smile lighting up his face as he recalled something, "I was a scoundrel."

He told Emily stories from his childhood occasionally, but always carefully edited ones, Emily suspected. This time, he told her about him and his friends finding a window with a broken latch at an opera house in Karnaca, and sneaking in through one of the upper floors to watch a show from the rafters. 

Emily giggled under her breath, heedful of making any sound in the dusty corridor, and listened as Corvo relayed how his group of friends ran into a maintenance worker while sneaking out of the opera house and did not know which of them had the worse scare.

Her mind wandered to how Corvo seemed both different and the same, in unexpected ways. It wasn't just the borrowed Whaler coat he wore, or the new lines etched deep in his face, or how he seemed so much more tired than before. Something inside him had bent, enough that even Emily noticed. He seemed afraid to look away from her sometimes, and when he did, when his eyes strayed, he would sometimes look back towards her quickly, as if worried she would disappear between blinks.

Corvo finished his story and rose from the stairs, going towards the roof door to check that the Watch patrol had passed.

Emily, feeling only just a little guilty, slipped the Heart out of the Void and into her hands, holding it up towards his back.

' _They came closer to breaking him than even they knew_ ,' the Heart said, voice laden with sadness. And squeezed a second time, continued, ' _He has escaped his tormentors, yet he is their prisoner every time he closes his eyes. Oh, Corvo..._ ' The last part was a pained sigh, the Heart's gears stuttering as it contracted in Emily's hands, suffering. Emily felt the same echoed in her own chest.

She had not thought Corvo to be haunted by nightmares like she was, but his year had not been any easier than hers. Why wouldn't he have nightmares? How could he possibly not?

"It looks safe enough," Corvo said, oblivious to the knot of tears in Emily's throat. "What--"

He was taken aback as Emily threw her arms around him and buried her face against his chest, but he returned the hug easily.

"Alright...?" he said, or asked, uncertainly.

"I just," Emily sniffed loudly, "I love you and I'm glad you came for me."

"Of course," Corvo said, "of course I would have come for you. Emily..." He held her tightly. "I should have been there sooner."

"Y'were just in time," Emily said, her voice shaky. 

 

* * *

 

Billie's safehouse was in the Distillery District, a mattress on the ground, a working sink, and shelves filled with weapons and supplies. It reminded Emily of nothing so much as the Bottle Street Gang's armory, where she'd sometimes go to steal food. It seemed nothing like a home, though given that it was in a boarded up apartment, accessible only through the balcony, Emily supposed it was safe enough.

When they arrived, dropping down on the balcony, Corvo carefully pulled Emily back, pointing out the tripwire across the threshold. She made an annoyed sound; it wasn't like she wouldn't have noticed it herself, she'd only ever triggered one tripwire, and that was because of how tired she was at the time.

"Come in, you two," Billie called out.

They stepped in to find Billie pulling down the sleeve on her wristbow. She'd been ready to shoot intruders, obviously.

"This is where you live?" Emily asked.

"It's where I'm staying," Billie corrected. She opened her mouth to speak further, but seemed uncertain what to talk about. "Is something wrong?"

"No," Emily said, wandering up to Billie, scanning the shelves for anything interesting. "Daud's dealing with the High Overseer. I just wanted to get out of the Flooded District."

"Oh, well," Billie took out a piece of dry bread from her pocket. "Would you like to feed the rats with me?"

Emily nodded, happy for any distraction. Billie had shown Emily, once, the dry heart she carried in her pocket, that allowed her to hear the whispers of rats. It was a smaller, a simpler thing than the heart Emily carried. A less heavy burden, in some ways, but useful. A gift from Billie's first love, that Billie would cherish for more than just the benefits it conferred. 

Billie fed the rats with bread, apple peelings, leftovers from her own meals, whatever she had lying around. In small numbers, when they did not bite, Emily thought the rats were quite cute. Their tiny noses twitched, and their paws were strangely human-like. Hard to remember, at times like this, that these were the same animals responsible for the devastation in Dunwall, and Emily said so out loud.

"Hm," Billie tilted her head thoughtfully as she looked at the two rats on the floor of her room. "I have to wonder if they are the same, really."

"What do you mean?" Emily asked.

"I mean that I've handled my fair share of rats over the years," Billie said, "so I've come to know what to expect. A couple of years back, though, I began to notice... some newcomers."

"Rat newcomers?" Emily frowned.

"It's not uncommon. Sometimes when Dunwall has ships coming in from Pandyssia, there'll be a few of those big ones from the continent. They're a bit different than the Dunwall ones, not as friendly. I've talked to a few, and they even sound different. Don't know, I guess they just make 'em meaner in Pandyssia." Billie shrugged. 

"But we've never had a plague this bad before," Emily said.

"That's true," Billie agreed. "And even then, the sickness started inland, not near the docks, like you'd expect. There's so many of these Pandyssian rats around, that I find it hard to believe they're not the ones responsible. But then, some of the facts don't line up very well."

Corvo, who'd been inspecting the shelves, whipped his head around to look at Billie, and it was his visible reaction that made Emily ask what she did next.

"You think someone is responsible for the plague?"

Billie's expression was grave, but she shrugged, still looking down at the rats.

"I don't exactly have proof," she said. "And a lot of people have been profiting from the plague, so I couldn't narrow down a suspect even if you asked. But..."

"But?" Emily asked.

"There's this doctor," Billie said, "he lives on Clavering. I know he's been gathering information about the rats and the plague. Studying them. I'm sure, somewhere in his notes, there's bound to be some interesting tidbits."

"Can you get the notes?" Emily asked.

"Emily," Corvo interjected, more amused than forbidding, "you could just ask once you're Empress."

"But I want to know _now_ ," Emily insisted. 

"I can get it," Billie assured, her smile slanting into something confident. Getting into places was something Billie had always been good at, to hear her tell it; obviously she was happy to be back on solid ground.

 

* * *

 

Corvo and Emily were halfway back to the Flooded District when Emily spoke up.

"I wasn't going to ask Daud to kill the High Overseer anyway," she said.

"I know," Corvo said, but then he gestured for Emily to stop, and she retracted her far reach, trailing to a halt on a rooftop. "You'll be Empress, Emily. You'll have the lives of people in your hands. A day will come when you will be able to order an execution, and nobody, including me, will have the power to stop it. And I'm afraid..." His expression grew strained, almost sad. "I'm afraid that you might forget that just because it's an option, it doesn't mean you have to pick it."

"It's about the kind of Empress I want to be, isn't it?" Emily said. "I've been thinking about that..." Her lips pursed together, and she was displeased to admit, "Daud said something that had me thinking about that, actually. I didn't think about it enough before, but I guess I... I'll have to now..."

A silence settled over them, strange and fragile as they considered the life ahead. Twilight was creeping across Dunwall, tinging violet at the horizon, and the sounds of the city floated up; voices, wheels on rails, the tinny sound of the broadcast system rattling its announcements, the buzz of a wall of light from somewhere nearby.

"Oh! I was going to get you something," Emily said, remembering suddenly. "Wait here!"

She turned to spring into another direction.

"Emily? Wait, where are you going?" Corvo dashed after her.

"Don't worry, not far, I'll be right back!" she said over her shoulder, as she reached onto the next building over, up on a balcony railing and then away.

She heard Corvo call after her one last time, but she was long gone.

 

* * *

 

Emily recalled very suddenly, only as she recognized the neighborhood, that she was actually quite close to one of the sewer entrances leading to Granny Rags' lair. It had not occurred to her, since returning to Dunwall, to drop in and visit the old woman. Even now, she couldn't say she had any real desire to see her.

But she found the entrance anyway. She'd hidden a key in a crevice nearby, and pulled it out a bit rustier than she'd left it. The key turned in the lock anyway, even if with a louder scrape than she remembered.

The large earthen room was quiet, Granny nowhere in sight. There was a bathtub, with more bones than when Emily had seen it last, and in a corner of the room, Granny had drawn her circles, filled them in with elaborate script. The shack was empty, and Emily was relieved. The corner she'd claimed for herself in Granny's shack was still untouched, her mattress and boxes just as she'd left them, even the bedsheets still tangled like the last time she rose from sleep there.

She gathered up her notes, stuffing them down her jacket, but then she dipped her hand under the pillow, groping for the object she specifically came to find. Her fingers closed around the bonecharm just as she'd left it, and she stuffed it into one of her pouches, victorious.

Emily ran down the walkway, noisy as it rattled under her feet, and then she headed for the tunnel leading out, when she felt more than hear the inside-out sound of someone appearing behind her.

She froze, sudden awareness of her list of enemies washing over her, and turned around on her heel.

"Why, look at my little birdy, finally flown back home." A slow smile spread across Granny Rags' face, and she clasped her hands together in front of her chest, delighted. 

"O-oh, Granny--" Emily was stopped from saying anything more as Granny leaned forward, grasping Emily's chin.

"Forgot your poor old Granny, dearie?" the old woman asked, sharp and hard, her eyes unusually focused.

It was then that Emily felt the prickle of her old fear, that healthy wariness of Granny Rags that had kept her from doing anything truly unwise while she'd been living in the old woman's shadow. Granny's fingers were not holding her chin especially hard, but Emily felt something dangerous in the wrinkled fingers anyway.

"I'm sorry, Granny," she said, careful and slow. "I didn't get to say goodbye when Delilah took me."

Something grew taut behind Granny's eyes at that remark, and Granny straightened up the way offended aristocrats would gather themselves up in the face of insult.

"Took you?" Granny repeated, voice dangerous.

"A witch, Delilah," Emily said quickly. "She took me out of the city."

"Did she, now?" Granny rags said. "What a rude little girl she is. Sticky fingers, that one, I always thought so. Always touching things which aren't hers."

Emily blinked, trying to parse Granny's words. Had Granny and Delilah met before?

"But is she the one you're flying back to now, hmm?" Granny asked, her attention returning to Emily.

"You... weren't here," Emily said slowly.

"And you were not even going to wait," Granny sighed, long-suffering. "Tsk tsk!"

"I'm sorry, I-- I have someone waiting. I need to give him a gift."

Granny tutted, shaking her head, about to say something, before Emily got a sudden strike of inspiration.

"I have a gift for you too," Emily said, reaching into her pouch. Granny's eyes tracked the movement, though unseeing.

Emily removed the small rat skull from her pouch, the graverat still dormant. It took just a small poke to wake him up. Magic flickered off the skull like smoke, and formed into hard flesh. She presented the graverat to Granny Rags, like an offering.

Something softened in the old woman. Her body fell out of its indignant lines, as she picked up the rat from Emily's hands.

"Oh, what a precious little prize," Granny cooed, delighted. "How delightful," she said, cradling the graverat like precious porcelain, while the rat showed no outward sign of caring for it one way or the other. Granny brushed her knuckles against Emily's cheek, smiling at her, all bother forgotten. "Very well done, dear. I knew I wasn't wrong about you. Granny has an eye for talent, you know."

Emily was bewildered by the remark, but let it go as Granny turned away and walked to her shack, muttering happily to herself.

She departed quickly, unwilling to draw any more of Granny Rags' attention.

But that Delilah and Granny Rags might know each other was an interesting morsel of information, and Emily wondered if maybe she could use this against Delilah somehow. She'd have to be dealt with eventually, after all, and Granny had proved herself eerily good at... dealing with people.

 

* * *

 

Corvo was right where Emily had left him, pacing the roof like an anxious, fenced-in hound. She didn't think she'd been away for long, but it was apparently just enough to wind him up.

"This is for you," Emily said by way of apology, presenting him with the bonecharm.

Corvo turned it over in his hands, bewildered.

"This is what you shot off to get?" he asked, doubtful.

"If you put it under your pillow when you sleep, you won't have nightmares," Emily said.

Corvo's expression grew guarded.

"Who told you I have nightmares?" he asked.

"...Don't you?" Emily asked. " _I_ do."

"Then you should keep it," he said, placing it back into her palm. But Emily shook her head, pushing it back.

"No, I can make my own," she said. "This one's for you. It's a gift! Don't you want it?" She gave him her best doe-eyed look, trying to appear both guileless and pleading.

"Alright, enough with the puppy-dog eyes," Corvo snorted, slipping the bonecharm into his pocket. "Thank you. I... appreciate the concern. Even though I should be the one taking care of you." 

"You do take care of me!" Emily declared cheerfully, taking his hand. "You took me on a nice walk and a playdate!"

"Where you conspired to rob an honest, hard-working doctor with a former assassin," Corvo said tiredly. "Truly the day has been a success."

"It's for a good cause," Emily shrugged. "And Billie should get out more anyway. I don't like her spending all her time in that tiny room all by herself." And the other part that Emily did not speak out loud, because she didn't want to sound silly saying it, but, she was going to require a Royal Spymaster soon enough. And if that couldn't be Billie, then Emily was fine with a personal spy instead, to keep an eye on whoever was going to hold that position.

Corvo gave her a sidelong glance.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing," he replied, the corner of his mouth twitching upward, just slightly. "You'll make an interesting Empress."

"You really think so?" Emily tilted her head.

"Oh, yes," Corvo said. "I can barely wait to see it."

Emily puffed her chest, bouncing on her heels. She had always dreaded the responsibilities and trappings that would come with the throne and the title, but she had spent the year kidnapped, orphaned, terrified, and deceived in turn. She had seen sides of Dunwall that would never have been revealed to her if her gilded upbringing had not suffered this interruption. 

And perhaps she still did not precisely look forward to the drearier aspects of it, but now she wanted to see the kind of empress she would become, too. She wanted to see what she was capable of.

It was time to go home. They were finally getting there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This felt like a good point to stop, because it is effectively the end of Emily's Year of Hell, and it's all just a few short steps to the throne for her from this point on. Though her reign's certainly going to be interesting, ohoho. Delilah's still lurking out there somewhere, after all. And Emily's had nothing but bad influences! She's going to be a fun empress, I'm sure.
> 
> Thank you everyone who has read and kudos'd and commented. You're all wonderful, and I'm glad you could join me on this trip. You can find me on tumblr, where I am also Azzandra.


	8. Epilogue: Ever After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was unplanned, but here is a little epilogue, with just a few scenes of Emily's life a few years down the line. Thank you again to everyone who read and commented on this fic, you guys are an inspiration.

Emily burst into the Royal Spymaster's office like a sudden storm, door banging open, but the Royal Spymaster herself was conspicuously missing, and Emily only managed to make Billie's aide nearly jump out of his skin.

"Where's the Spymaster?" Emily asked the aide, and the man nearly wilted under her gaze.

"She's seeing the Royal Physician," he started saying, and did not get to finish before Emily stormed out again.

This time, when Emily burst through a door, banging it open so hard it bounced against the wall, she was satisfied that she burst in on exactly the person she'd been seeking.

Anton Sokolov was just in the process of pouring a drink for Billie when Emily surprised him, and made him spill the bottle all across the table. The sharp, strong scent of pear brandy filled the room, even as Anton hastily mopped up the liquid with his handkerchief.

"Were you going to tell me about Delilah?" Emily demanded in a low hiss, and then pushed the door behind her closed with her heel. "Were you even going to do anything about her?"

Billie, for her part looked completely impassive, and utterly unimpressed with Emily's histrionics. Where most people would have balked at being the focus of their Empress' ire, Billie merely took the bottle of brandy from Anton and poured herself a drink from what remained.

"You get my reports," Billie said, perfectly at ease.

"And your reports don't mention Delilah!" Emily accused. "They go on and on about unrest in Morley--and there's always unrest in Morley--but hardly any mention of the fact that Delilah has surfaced again! I have to hear about it from Galia! Don't you think I'd want to know about that?"

"What you want to know, _Your Majesty_ ," Billie said, using the title pointedly, "is the dirt on Lord Inchmouth, because he and his supporters are blocking your budget bill for the Rudshore reclamation project. And that's exactly what my next report is going to have for you, exactly as you requested. But as for Delilah, she's not for you to worry about until I have something concrete for you, more than just rumors and lies."

Emily scowled, her fists clenched, her body stuck into stubborn lines.

"You can't jump at shadows every time you hear her name, Emily," Billie said, not unkindly.

"I wouldn't have to, if my Spymaster was doing her job instead of having a nightcap with a--" Emily scowled at Sokolov, before softening, knowing that attacking the man just for being in her vicinity was unfair. "With the Royal Physician," she said, after taking a breath to calm down.

"Mm, yes, well, if I may reassure Your Majesty," Anton said, "Delilah was in fact the subject Billie was attempting to discuss."

"Oh?" Emily's eyebrows rose.

"I was Delilah's teacher, once," Anton said, puffing up reflexively. 

Emily had forgotten that part. Well, Anton had been teacher to an entire generation, if not in art, then in natural philosophy. He'd even been Emily's teacher for that matter. It was easy to forget just how truly prolific he was in that respect.

"Oh." Emily's temper deflated somewhat. "And--do you have anything valuable to provide about her?"

"More things that speak to her character, than information about her whereabouts," Anton said. "I'm afraid we haven't been in contact in quite some years."

"Well... as you were then," Emily said, gathering herself up, and leaving in a much more dignified manner than she arrived in.

 

* * *

 

It was only a few weeks until her fifteenth birthday, and all Emily could think of was that she could not believe she'd been on the throne for well over four years now. It certainly did not feel as long as that. It seemed, in some ways, that only yesterday she'd escaped from Brigmore.

Billie was right. She couldn't jump at shadows whenever she heard Delilah's name. But at any given time, she could feel Delilah out there, waiting, scheming. Rumors and lies had been as much as anyone had heard of the witch, but on occasion there was a credible report of a strange woman, fascinating and terrifying, exerting her will upon some weaker noble or man of influence, and Emily felt her hackles rise.

There was no way Delilah had given up her ambitions for the throne, and Emily was not going to get blindsided again.

Unfortunately, she often felt her vigilance was not precisely matched by those she trusted most.

Corvo, for his part, insisted she shouldn't worry personally about this.

"You're making me feel redundant as Royal Protector," he told her one evening, during one of their training sessions out by the river. 

"You're teaching me to protect myself, that's doing more to keep me safe than any other Royal Protector has done in memory," Emily replied, only half paying attention as she went through a sword drill.

"Not what I mean. Elbow in," he corrected off-handedly, before continuing. "You've got people looking out for you, Emily. If you don't trust me to watch your back, then at least trust in Billie's ability to do her own job. She's a wily one. She can untangle any web Delilah weaves."

"I trust the both of you! How could you think otherwise?" Emily said, coming to the end of her exercise and turning to look at Corvo.

"Trust us to worry about this _for_ you, then," Corvo said. "You're letting this Delilah thing distract you from your own job."

Emily's lips pursed together.

"I know it's more exciting to deal with an immediate danger, like some shadowy usurper that you can just stab and be done with," Corvo continued reasonably, "but this boring governance business tragically must take priority, no matter how small the chance that you'll ever get to stab someone in the process."

"I don't know about that. Lord Inchmouth does present himself as a good stabbing candidate," Emily said lightly.

"You're Empress now," Corvo said, feigning sternness. "You have people to do that for you."

Emily twitched a smile at Corvo, but her heart wasn't really in it. She sheathed her sword, considering her father's words.

"Are we done for tonight?" she asked. "There's one more thing I need to get to."

"Yes, that's about it, I suppose," Corvo said. "Is it something you need help with?"

"No, nothing like that," Emily said. "Just going to drop in for a visit. Will you need help getting back to Dunwall Tower, or can your old man knees withstand the trip?" She smirked at him.

Corvo snorted, clearly unamused.

"You say that like my knees will be doing much of anything," he returned, and then reached out a hand towards the nearest roof, disappearing from sight. He reappeared briefly on the edge of the roof, before vanishing once again, gone like the mist.

Emily laughed softly as she was left alone in the empty alley. They'd barricaded both ends of the alley, making it only accessible by rooftop, and that suited both of them fine, considering their shared abilities. 

 

* * *

 

Emily's visit meant taking a short-cut through the sewers, which she was more and more loathe to do as the years passed. The smell brought up bad memories, and even though it was merely as repulsive as ordinary sewer smell, sometimes, when it was particularly heavy, she thought she could scent the rat plague again. 

But there was no helping it. She emerged again near an abandoned factory on the Wrenhaven River, boarded up since before her mother's reign and caught up in legal limbo as the family who owned it was split by an inheritance dispute.

This was where Granny Rags had most recently settled, making her bedroom among the quiet, rusting machinery, and using the floor space for her rituals.

"Is that you, my little birdy? Have you remembered your dear old Granny?" the witch's voice rang out of the darkness as Emily squeezed in through an upper window.

Emily dropped to the ground, and Granny Rags was already waiting for her nearby, grinning her blunt teeth at Emily.

"Hello, Granny," Emily said, and reached into her pocket to take out the long ivory tusk she'd been saving.

Granny took the ivory with a delighted gasp.

"How lovely, I haven't had such a fine canvas in years!" she said, assessing the tusk, her head tilting this way and that, as if she could actually see. "Don't think you can skip on your lessons, dearie, just because you brought me something nice for my birthday!"

"Of course not," Emily said. It was not Granny's birthday anyway, unless it was every time Emily brought her something. But in this case, she truly was there for a lesson. "I've been practicing," she added hopefully. 

"We'll see if you have," Granny said, gaining some of her usual sharpness, the awareness that she only seemed to possess where Emily's magic lessons were concerned.

Emily rolled up her sleeves, and got started.

 

* * *

 

It was in the chilly hours of pre-dawn that Emily finally made her way back to Dunwall Tower. She slunk along the rooftops quietly, a wraith of shadow, barely an inky stain in the moonlight.

The patrols intercepted her before she got too near to the Tower. They did not stop her, correctly identifying who she was, but they halted nearby, stepping out in the open so she would know they were there. Emily dropped the pretense of sneaking once they did.

A quirk of the Mark that Emily belatedly found out about: those she trusted enough, her favored, took on a few of her powers. The far reach, the ability to turn into shadows, a certain enhanced vitality. Useful, for those of her allies who could be trusted to know about her Mark. 

Not as many as Daud or Delilah had had as followers, when Emily added them up, but she was Empress, and trust was a treacherous thing for her. It came more easily for those who'd helped her before she had the throne: Corvo, Billie, and those of the Whalers that had chosen to fall in with her after Daud's disappearance.

They did not wear the Whaler coats anymore. Emily had ensured they received proper uniforms once they came into her employ, though they did still prefer masks, and so Emily had new ones commissioned for them. Piero Joplin had outdone himself in this task; the contraptions not only had intricate lenses with a variety of uses, allowing them to see far away, through fog or low light, but the metallic masks were distinctive in appearance, almost skeletal, and immediately identified the wearer as belonging to the Empress' own Blacksparrow Brigade.

There were other defenses around the Tower, of course. The Blacksparrows were a formidable force on their own, but Emily knew enough not to rely solely on them, especially considering that they might be dispatched to other tasks.

Emily stopped near one of the crows' nests set up around the tower, little more than a pole with a perch. Beady eyes turned to look down at her--actual beads, set in a crow's skull--and the undead bird croaked scratchily as it acknowledged her.

She felt more than saw Thomas appear next to her.

"Quiet tonight?" Emily asked.

"As quiet as it gets in this city," Thomas said. "We're keeping close attention."

Emily nodded. She knew why, they all knew why. At least she knew she wasn't alone in worrying. It took a weight off that she hadn't even realized she was carrying.

She moved on, reaching her bedroom window just as dawn began graying the horizon and snuffing out the stars.

It was already much too late--or much too early, rather--to catch any sleep, so instead Emily went into the adjoining bathroom and took a cold, bracing shower.

She toweled her hair ruthlessly, and was half-dressed when Alexi Mayhew bustled through the door.

"Emily, you were gone all night!" Alexi said, chiding. She looked Emily up and down, took in her owlish expression, and frowned disapprovingly. "Did you get any sleep at all?"

"I'll get to bed early tonight," Emily promised, plopping herself down at her vanity, and giving her hairbrush a long look.

"You're hopeless," Alexi said, and picked up Emily's hairbrush herself. She began attacking the long dark locks, brushing Emily's hair into submission.

Emily didn't complain, even though Alexi didn't precisely have a light hand. She stifled a yawn instead, and allowed Alexi to fuss as much as she wanted, if it meant getting ready for the day with minimal effort on her part.

"You have to meet the High Overseer later, you know," Alexi said, and opened the box of cosmetics on the vanity. 

Some of it would be for Emily's face, of course, to smooth out her complexion, pocked with the blemishes of adolescence that even being an Empress couldn't save her from. A little around the eyes, too, hiding the dark circles she had after a night of exerting herself.

But Alexi paid special attention to Emily's hand, layering and blending in foundation on the back of her left hand until the Mark was concealed completely. Gloves or wraps did the job well enough most of the time, but Alexi had struck upon the idea of using cosmetics, and Emily couldn't argue with the results.

As Alexi finished, Emily found herself smiling up at her.

"What?" Alexi asked, when she noticed Emily's expression.

"Nothing," Emily said. "It's just nice."

"What is?" Alexi's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Emily shrugged, unsure how to answer. The trust, perhaps. The reassurance. Having people around her to worry for her.

"Being home," Emily finally answered, and that was true enough.

**Author's Note:**

> So, a while ago I came across a prompt on the kink meme about what would happen if Corvo died during DH1, and my first thought was 'Well, Emily would get the Mark then.' Which kicked off an interesting series of speculations for me. Now, I don't want to kill Corvo, but imagining Emily with the Mark was too interesting to pass up.
> 
> Anyway, you can find me on [tumblr](http://azzandra.tumblr.com/).


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